Matt

Matt Bowler is a DBA at Trade Me, and teaches database design and administration courses at the local institute of technology. A recent but avid discoverer of SQL Server, Matt is a regular contributor to forums at MSDN, Experts Exchange and SSC and he blogs at mattsql.wordpress.com.

Blog Post

Conditional Aggregates

The Problem: A legacy table contains amounts and a char column indicating whether the amount is a credit or a...

2014-02-11 (first published: )

3,083 reads

Blog Post

Duplicate Statistics

The Setup:
Standard best practise is to have auto create and auto update statistics set for SQL Server databases. But there...

2013-09-03 (first published: )

3,506 reads

Blogs

The Book of Redgate: Spread across the world

By

This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...

Merry Christmas

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Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...

Self-Hosting a Photo Server the Whole Family Can Use

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Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...

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Forums

SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression Algorithm

By Johan Bijnens

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression...

The Large Encoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Large Encoded Value

The Side Job

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Side Job

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Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

See possible answers