Steve Jones

My background is I have been working with computers since I was about 12. My first "career" job in this industry was with network administration where I became the local DBA by default. I have also spent lots of time administering Netware and NT networks, developing software, managing smaller IT groups, making lots of coffee, ordering pizza for late nights, etc., etc.

I currently am the editor of SQL Server Central and an advocate/architect at Redgate Software. I am also the President of SQL Saturday, maintain the T-SQL Tuesday monthly party, and remember our colleagues at sqlmemorial.org.

You can find out more about me on my blog (www.voiceofthedba.com) or LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/way0utwest)
  • Interests: yoga, reading, biking, snowboarding, volleyball

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Blog Post

Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art

I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece of ASCII Art. I have a screenshot here: For some reason, I thought, “I should...

2026-01-20 (first published: )

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Blogs

Advice I Like: Ranch Rules

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Leave a gate behind you the way you first found it. – from Excellent...

Fix Slow, Bloated MSDB: Purge Old History And Add Missing Indexes

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Fix Slow, Bloated MSDB: Purge Old History And Add Missing Indexes ...

Three Ways to Use Snowflake Data in Microsoft Fabric

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Organizations increasingly want Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric to coexist without duplicating data or fragmenting...

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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...

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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)

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