I started out working with Microsoft Access and SQL Server back in 2000 as the only employee doing IT full-time, and worked most of my career where “big fish in a little pond” was an overstatement. Learning is scarce when you do everything and don’t work with anyone who knows more than you. In 2010 I was plunged into the Ocean and grabbed onto anything I could find to stay afloat. I wasn’t going to simply run scripts I didn’t understand, so I learned the DMVs and system tables in the scripts I found and rewrote them all. Now, I know enough where I can start giving back to a community that saved me from drowning.

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Blog Post

Advent of Code

If you want your skills to be sharp, you practice.  If you want to get yourself to actually do practice, you call it a “challenge”.  This is what the...

2015-12-23

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Question of the Day

Encoding URLs

I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table: 

CREATE TABLE Response
( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY
, ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000)
)
GO
If I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use?

See possible answers