IDENTITY Property

SQLServerCentral Article

The IDENTITY Column Property

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There are a number of ways to generate key values in SQL Server tables including the IDENTITY column property, the NEWID() function and more recently, SEQUENCES. The IDENTITY column property is the earliest of these methods. It was introduced very early in the history of SQL Server and it is arguably the simplest approach. Though old, IDENTITY is still maintained in modern versions of SQL Server and is still relevant for simple use cases.

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2020-05-21

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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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