Mala Mahadevan

My name is Malathi, a.k.a Mala - I am a DBA turned BI/Data Science person, working with SQL Server since 6.5. I am also founder of the Louisville SQL Server user group, organizer of 8 SQL Saturdays, Regional mentor for northeast, and 14-year PASS conference attendee. In my spare time I love to garden, travel, read, paint, and do yoga.

Blog Post

Telecommute Resources

This is a summary of potential resources for any tech person who is interested in working from home – temporarily or full time. It came about from a twitter...

2020-03-18 (first published: )

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SQLServerCentral Article

Querying database schema using graph tables

SQL Server 2017 introduced the concept of graph data tables as part of the SQL Server database engine. With SQL Server 2019, there were some enhancements like ‘shortest path’ function and constraints on edge tables that make this feature more usable – although it is far from a full-fledged graph database. Graph tables are essentially […]

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2019-12-23

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Question of the Day

The Decoded Value

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:

DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!';
DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX);

SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000)));
SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded) 

See possible answers