SmartPaster
I recently discovered this great little free Visual Studio Add-in that allows pasting text as preformatted strings in VB or...
2012-02-02
818 reads
Case Sensitive searches in T-SQL
I just ran into an issue with one of my applications where a SQL statement had updated a status code...
2012-01-19
2,707 reads
Excel for the DBA, Part 1–The Basics
This will be a series of handy hints for people that know SQL and are frustrated by Excel. I am...
2011-12-06
2,114 reads
An Attempt to Make SSIS Package Deployment More Reasonable
Full disclosure: There might be a better way to do this. I am not aware of it.
Problems:
Maintaining multiple DB environments...
2011-11-03
1,466 reads
Save a step: Using Computed Columns in a Table Variable (or Temp Table)
One of the databases that I support reports all money values in both the local currency and US Dollars. Very...
2011-10-28
15,197 reads
Tobias Ternstrom’s Great Denali Preview
Tobias Ternstrom from Microsoft gave a great talk at Tech Ed regarding upcoming features of SQL Server Denali. His presentation...
2011-06-30
2,222 reads
The Recursive CTE
(Yet another boring org chart example – except this one has multiple roots)
One of my apps has a hierarchial org chart...
2011-05-18
1,693 reads
How to determine the current SSIS runtime environment
If you want to test if you’re currently debugging an SSIS package via BIDS/Visual Studio, or running normally via DTExec,...
2011-04-28
2,412 reads
Renumbering Rows in a Table Variable (or Table/Temp Table)
I was recently working on a data cleanup problem where I had to do lots of comparisons of one row...
2011-02-24
2,097 reads
Renumbering Rows in a Table Variable (or Table/Temp Table)
I was recently working on a data cleanup problem where I had to do lots of comparisons of one row...
2011-02-18
4,300 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