Igor Micev

Integration specialist, Developer & Programmer, Database administrator, and Architect with 15+ years of
expertise. Experienced in software development, database analysis & design, performance tuning, upgrades &
migrations, high availability solutions implementation, and design, backup and recovery strategies, and system
capacity planning.

SQLServerCentral Article

The COUNT Function in T-SQL

The COUNT function is among the most used functions in the T-SQL codes. Even though COUNT is easy to use, it should be used carefully because it could often not return the desired result. For the big tables, the counting of the rows could cause blocking as well as take some more time.

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2018-02-09 (first published: )

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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) 

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