Patrick

Patrick Keisler is a Senior CSA - Engineering for Microsoft with over 20 years of SQL Server experience working in various fields such as financial, healthcare, and government. You can follow him on Twitter or listen to him speak at various SQL Saturdays and user group meetings.

Blog Post

How to Convert FileTime to DateTime

One of my customers recently wanted to rename each of the SQL audit files will the datetime stamp of when it was created. I explained to them the filename...

2025-01-15 (first published: )

598 reads

Blog Post

Trace Flag 3625 Follow Up

Several months ago, I discussed my customer’s intention to enable trace flag 3625. Since that time, we have observed an intriguing phenomenon when encountering a login failure. To demonstrate...

2024-12-13 (first published: )

493 reads

Blog Post

How to Test Trace Flag 3625

Recently, one of my customers considered enabling Trace Flag 3625 on one of their SQL Servers, but they wanted a way to quickly test its functionality beforehand. For those...

2023-12-22 (first published: )

520 reads

Blogs

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

By

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

Monday Monitor Tips: SQL Auditing Preview

By

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

By

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

Read the latest Blogs

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...

Visit the forum

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