Qian Ye


SQLServerCentral Article

Differential Backup Tricks

Differential backups are left out of many DBAs backup strategy, but they are a great tool to shrink your backup window, save disk space, and more. However they can be slightly tricky when you look to perform a restore. New author Qian Ye brings us an interesting issue that occured during differential testing.

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2006-06-14

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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) 

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