Technical Article

Is it still worth it to sponsor PASS Summit?

Conference planning is underway. Several folks have asked me whether I think the PASS conference is still worth exhibiting. I thought an article would be best to break down my thoughts. I’m in an interesting position, being a marketing leader who also specializes in SQL Server and doesn’t work for Microsoft. I’ve worked directly for several companies in the ecosystem, so I know how difficult reaching the DBA market has been post-pandemic.

External Article

Is your DevOps strategy missing a vital link?

Database DevOps practices can help you ship features faster, but how do you safely enable this, and ensure those updates will successfully deploy? Redgate Test Data Manager was developed to resolve bottlenecks and challenges, helping organizations ship deployments they can trust by enabling developers and testers to self-serve test data that walks and talks like production with sensitive customer data taken care of. Read more on the blog.

SQLServerCentral Article

Big Northwind with AI

As part of my work with Redgate, I wanted to do some testing on our subsetting and masking tools. Subsetting needs a big data set, and while Stack Overflow is big, it's kind of simple. I wanted something a little different. Since our engineers use Northwind to do a lot of demos, I decided to […]

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Outside Interests

I'm a little excited because tomorrow I'm going to my first maker's faire. I'll be volunteering with our local radio club (100 year old, W5IAS, oldest radio club in Oklahoma). In addition, I'll be showing off a few controller chips & Raspberry Pis that I use with my radios for APRS, satellite tracking, and digital […]

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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