SQLBalls

Bradley Ball is a Sr. Azure FastTrack Customer Engineer for Microsoft, and former Data Platform MVP. During his IT career Bradley has spent 8 years working as a Defense contractor for clients such as the U.S. Army, The Executive Office of the President of the United States for the Obama Administration, and is the former Data Platform Practice Manager for Pragmatic Works Consulting, now 3Cloud. He has presented at SQL Saturdays, SSUG's, SQL Rally, DevConnections, SQLBits, SQL Live 360, and the PASS Summit. Bradley co-hosts the Tales From The Field YouTube show https://aka.ms/TftF/youtube , he can also be found blogging on https://www.SQLBalls.com

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Blog Post

Optimize For Unknown

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a while.  I was working with a friend and we came across an interesting problem....

2016-12-21 (first published: )

3,319 reads

Optimize For Unknown

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a while.  I was working with a friend and we came across an interesting problem.  They had a large amount of skewness/data skew.  This...

2016-12-05

5 reads

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Blogs

2025 Wrapped for Steve

By

I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I...

The Book of Redgate: Spread across the world

By

This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...

Merry Christmas

By

Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...

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Forums

SQL Server 2019 - Agent job PowerShell step issue

By Pete Bishop

I have a couple of SQL Agent job steps which run PowerShell commands of...

Database security permissions save script

By Srinivas Merugu

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Database security permissions save script

Database backup job steps

By Pete Bishop

I have a SQL Agent job for backing up a set of Analysis Services...

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Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

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