Connect with your SQL Community on Slack
Slack is a popular tool for team interaction. To describe it quickly, it's a feature-rich persistent chat room, with threads,...
2025-09-25 (first published: 2017-05-04)
595 reads
Will Assaf
Easily query your GitHub Contribution activity
For a variety of reasons, including your Microsoft MVP activity reports, you might want to summarize your GitHub activity across multiple repos. For contributors to Microsoft open-source docs on GitHub,...
2025-06-20 (first published: 2025-06-05)
281 reads
Migrate datetime data to datetimeoffset with AT TIME ZONE
I recently reviewed, worked on, and added a similar example to the DATETIMEOFFSET Microsoft Learn Docs article at the recommendation of my colleague Randolph West, who guessed (accurately) I...
2024-05-22 (first published: 2024-05-03)
399 reads
Tips, ideas, and recommendations on your technical blog
This technical blog is hardly the ideal, but I'll use this space here to summarize some of the guidance that my colleague Randolph West and I presented at a...
2023-11-13 (first published: 2023-10-27)
374 reads
Updated training list for a new DBA
Met an eager young volunteer at SQLSatBR over the weekend who inspired me to update a blog post that hadn't been refreshed in a few years. See the [UPDATED] Training...
2023-08-18 (first published: 2023-07-31)
602 reads
SQLSat Baton Rouge 2023!
Looking forward to #jambalaya at #SQLSatBR on July 29! Register today: sqlsatbr.comI hope to see as many people as possible that weekend, I'll be there at the Friday night...
2023-07-22 (first published: 2023-07-21)
22 reads
SQL Server 2022 Administration Inside Out
SQL Server 2022 Administration Inside Out is now available for pre-order from Microsoft Press. This book is far more than a quick update. We've rewritten and refreshed large portions of...
2023-03-25 (first published: 2023-03-24)
121 reads
30 Interview Questions for a Database Administrator and Developer
This blog post summarizes the type of technical questions I would ask candidates for a Microsoft SQL Server data platform administrator and database developer role.Hopefully this helps both candidates...
2023-03-08 (first published: 2023-02-28)
1,191 reads
Q&A on certification exams, exam prep, and test-taking skills
Part 2 of 2. This blog post is co-authored by Ajayi Anwansedo, PhD and William Assaf, who met and worked together at The Futures Fund, a STEM non-profit which offers introductory coding and...
2023-02-03 (first published: 2023-01-23)
269 reads
Exam Cram with DataWeekender talk - Think Like a Certification Exam
Fresh off of a two-part, co-authored blog series on certification exams and test-taking prep, I've got a fresh batch of fun sample questions for the January 2023 Data Weekender Exam...
2023-01-24
15 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