Extended Events Made Easy: Using XEvent Profiler
In this post we’ll look at how quick and easy it is to use the XEvent Profiler to create an...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-09-25)
5,770 reads
Matthew McGiffen
- Twitter: @MattMcGiffen
- Website: https://matthewmcgiffen.com/
How Secure is Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) – and How to Prevent Hacking
TDE is commonly described as “at-rest” encryption, i.e. it protects your data wherever it is stored on disk. This includes...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-01-03)
3,181 reads
Implementing Temporal Tables Where You Have Existing Data
In my post about auditing tools in SQL Server I mentioned a few tools we have at our disposal for...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2017-10-24)
4,602 reads
MAXDOP, Parallelism and the Cloud
Parallelism and MAXDOP The pros and cons of parallelism have always been with us in SQL Server and I blogged about this a couple of years ago. This is...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2019-04-03)
2,234 reads
Measuring SQL Query Performance
When running workshops on the subject of SQL Query Performance the first question I always ask is how do we measure...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2017-05-24)
36,087 reads
Overview of Encryption Tools in SQL Server
More and more people are considering some level of encryption against their data stored in SQL Server. In many cases...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2017-12-05)
4,229 reads
RDS encryption vs TDE
If you’re starting to use cloud services, the number of options available can be confusing. Particularly when they may seem...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-04-17)
6,074 reads
Rotating TDE Certificates without re-encrypting data
I talked previously about why we have each of the layers in the encryption hierarchy used to support TDE (Transparent...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-03-28)
3,217 reads
Row-count Estimates when there are no Statistics
I was discussing Cardinality Estimation with a colleague recently and the question came up, what cardinality does SQL Server use...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2017-06-28)
2,876 reads
SQL 2016 – Clone Database with Query Store
This is a quickie post to introduce the new DBCC command CLONEDATABASE.
Okay so this isn’t technically a SQL Server 2016...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2017-03-20)
2,357 reads
Blogs
Don’t Miss Out – SQL Server Query Tuning Fundamentals Starts Next Monday!
Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...
Monday Monitor Tips: SQL Auditing Preview
By Steve Jones
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
Microsoft fixed the AVX instruction issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now...
Forums
25 Years of SQL Server Central
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years of SQL Server...
The Decoded Value
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
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition...
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