Technical Article

Easy Package Configuration

One of the age old problems in DTS is moving packages between your development, test and production environments. Typically a series of manual edits needs to be done to all the packages to make sure that all the connection objects are pointing to the correct physical servers. This is time consuming and gives rise to the possibility of human error, particularly if the solution incorporates many DTS packages. Many companies have provided their own custom solutions for managing this problem but these are still workarounds for a problem that is inherently DTS's.

SQLServerCentral Article

Review - SQLPackager

Deploying a SQL Server database with your software can be tricky. It's easy to forget something that you added to development when trying to script out or detach and copy a database. And there's the whole problem of integrating the installation or upgrade into your main installation routine. New author Mark Vermeulen takes a look at Red Gate's SQLPackager, designed to make the job of deploying a database much easier.

SQLServerCentral Article

Four of a Kind - Backup Software Shootout Part 2

SQL Server has a rock solid backup and restore routine. However, it is not the most efficient way of handling the backups and restores. Neither in terms of time or space required. A number of software vendors have developed their own additions to SQL Server that accelerate or compress the backups (or both). Wesley Brown has taken four of these products into his environment and run some comparisons. Read about large databases in part 2 of this series.

SQLServerCentral Article

Boost Your Performance - Bad Index Detection

SQL Server depends heavily on good indexing to perform well. The optimizer requires relevant and intelligent indexing in order to do its job well. Author Andre Vigneau brings us a script that he uses to detect possible index problems in the database design as well as a number of hints to ensure that your database is performing optimally.

SQLServerCentral Article

Four of a Kind - Backup Software Shootout

SQL Server has a rock solid backup and restore routine. However, it is not the most efficient way of handling the backups and restores. Neither in terms of time or space required. A number of software vendors have developed their own additions to SQL Server that accelerate or compress the backups (or both). New Author Wesley Brown has taken four of these products into his environment and run some comparisons. Read part one of his review.

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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