My name is James Anderson and I am a SQL Server production DBA in the south of the UK. I have been working with databases since 2008. The first RDBMS I worked on was Paradox and I never want to see it again. I quickly moved to using T-SQL in SQL Server 2005. I have worked on every version of the product since. I enjoy query tuning and server optimisation. I detest transactional replication.

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Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...

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By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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The Decoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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By Sujai Krishna

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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)

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