Joe Sack

Joe Sack is a Principal Consultant, author and trainer at SQLskills.com.

Prior to joining SQLskills, Joe worked at Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer for large enterprise environments. He is a SQL Server MVP and Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) for versions 2005 & 2008. For his last few years at Microsoft, he was responsible for the SQL Server MCM Program (2009 to 2011). He has written multiple books, articles and whitepapers including SQL Server 2008 Transact-SQL Recipes (Apress, 2008) and SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Recipes (Apress, 2005).

SQLServerCentral Article

Windows Server 2012 Deduplication – Should you use it with SQL Server Backups?

Windows Server 2012 introduces native deduplication functionality. While this is a promising new Windows feature for other file types and characteristics, there are some potential pitfalls that you need to be aware of when it comes to deduplication specifically for SQL Server backup files.

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2013-02-08

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SQLServerCentral Article

SQL Server 2012’s Information on Parallel Thread Usage

In the SQL Server 2012 execution plan we can see better the true thread reservations for a query and not just information on the maximum degree of parallelism and row distribution across parallel threads; thanks to the new parallel thread usage information.

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2012-08-09

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The Decoded Value

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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