Muthusamy Anantha Kumar, a.k.a. MAK, has more than 10 years of experience in Information Technology including database Administration, System Analysis, Design, Development and Support of MS SQL Server 2005/2000/7.0/6.5/6.0/4.X for production/development/testing.

MAK started his first consulting service “JVCC” in Trichy, Tamilnadu, India. Then JVCC was matured to become “Softech Systems”, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India. MAK started teaching when he was 18 and continued teaching. As a part of service to the community, MAK’s started teaching MS-DOS, Word star, Lotus 123, dBase III +, C language, Autocad etc, MS-office, . He made more than 200 students aware of computers, programming languages and databases. MAK continued his teaching by teaching SQL Server administration and produced more than one hundred Professional Database Administrators.

MAK wrote many online articles for DatabaseJournal. He also wrote article for sql-server-performance.com. Now he is writing for us as well.

Blogs

Don’t Miss Out – SQL Server Query Tuning Fundamentals Starts Next Monday!

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

Monday Monitor Tips: SQL Auditing Preview

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One of the features we advocates have been advocating for is a better way...

SQL Server 2025 CU1 Fixes the Docker Desktop AVX Issue on macOS

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Microsoft fixed the AVX instruction issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now...

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Forums

25 Years of SQL Server Central

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years of SQL Server...

The Decoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Decoded Value

Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition in Kubernetes: A Cost-Effective Alternative to RDS

By Sujai Krishna

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition...

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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