books

Technical Article

Free eBook: SQL Server Execution Plans

  • Article

Every Database Administrator, developer, report writer, and anyone else who writes T-SQL to access SQL Server data, must understand how to read and interpret execution plans. This book leads you right from the basics of capturing plans, through how to interrupt them in their various forms, graphical or XML, and then how to use the information you find there to diagnose the most common causes of poor query performance, and so optimize your SQL queries, and improve your indexing strategy.

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2013-01-17

7,238 reads

Technical Article

Free eBook: Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer

  • Article

This free eBook from Redgate Software will take you from the fundamentals of Statistics, Cost Estimation, Index Selection, and the Execution Engine, and guide you through the inner workings of the Query Optimization process, and throws in a pragmatic look at Parameterization and Hints along the way.

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2020-12-09 (first published: )

54,472 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

The Art of SQL Server FILESTREAM by Jacob Sebastian and Sven Aelterman

  • Article

FILESTREAM is implemented as an extension to the VARBINARY(MAX) data type and allows large object data to be stored in a special folder on the NTFS file system, while bringing that data under the transactional control of SQL Server. This book describes both the way it works and the implementation, administration and troubleshooting of it.

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2012-11-12

580 reads

Technical Article

Free ebook: Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for the Accidental DBA

  • Article

Merry Christmas from SQLServerCentral. We spend much of our working life helping solve SQL Server-related performance problems, hands-on, during consulting, or on online forums. We've seen a few weird-and-wonderful issues but, mainly, it’s the same problems and misconceptions time-and-again. This is our attempt to describe, diagnose, and solve the most common problems with SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2. And it's free.

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2012-12-25 (first published: )

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Blogs

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Forums

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High Availability setup - has anyone seen this method?

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Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...

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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