Eric Rouach shows off a nice extension to T-SQL in SQL Server 2022:
Create External Table As Select or “CETAS” has finally become available on SQL Server with the release of the 2022 version.
After a short setup, we can create various formats files containing any query’s result set. The created file/s must be kept on an Azure storage solution i.e. Azure Blob Storage.
The process also creates an external table reflecting the updated file’s content.
We’ve been able to do this in Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated and serverless SQL pools for a while, so it’s good to be able to create an external table from a SELECT query on-premises, especially considering that it’s the only way we have left to write to external sources using PolyBase.