Category: T-SQL

Slava Murygin looks at some new functions in the vNext CTP 1.1:

Since Microsoft introduced XML support in SQL Server, the most common string concatenation technique was use of “XML PATH(”)” like this:

SELECT SUBSTRING(
(SELECT ‘, ‘ + name FROM master.sys.tables
FOR XML PATH(”))
,3,8000);
GO

Now you can aggregate your strings by using function “STRING_AGG”:

SELECT STRING_AGG(name, ‘, ‘) FROM master.sys.tables;

Read on for the other three.  This aggregation function, however, would make some of my code a lot simpler and easier to explain to junior database developers.  I just want it to perform well is all.

Denny Cherry recommends against nested views:

Now there are plenty of reasons to use views in applications, however views shouldn’t be the default way of building applications because they do have this potential problems.

While working with a client the other week we had to unwind some massive nest views. Several of these views were nested 5 and 6 levels deep with multiple views being referenced by each view. When queries would run they would take minutes to execute instead of the milliseconds that they should be running in. The problems that needed to be fixed were all indexed based, but because of the massive number of views that needed to be reviewed it took almost a day to tune the single query.

Nested views is usually an indicator of somebody trying to perform OOP on a relational database, taking advantage of encapsulation.  One big performance problem with nested views is that at some point, the query optimizer gives up trying to optimize and simply pulls in all of the tables as many times as they appear.  Make the optimizer’s life easier and it will make your life easier.

Andy Levy discusses the SET NOCOUNT operation:

So what happened here?  When you execute a query against SQL Server, both your data and some additional information is sent back to the client. This additional information is sent via a separate channel which is accessible via the SqlConnection.InfoMessages (or if you’re still using classic ADO, the InfoMessage) event. When you run queries in SSMS, you see this information in the Messages tab of the results pane most often as X row(s) affected.

That’s where my new stored procedures were causing problems. Where the original procedures were returning only one event which corresponded to the number of records returned by the single query in each procedure. But now that I’m loading temp tables, I’m getting multiple messages back – at a minimum, a count of the records affected when loading the temp table plus a count of the records returned to the calling application.

Data layers which can’t handle information streams are rare, but they do show up in the wild sometimes.

Louis Davidson looks at a couple edge cases with the STRING_SPLIT function in SQL Server 2016:

But what about the two versions of an empty value? ” (zero-length/empty string) and NULL. My NULL sense told me that the NULL one would return a single row with NULL, and the empty string would return a single empty string row.  Of course, I was wrong, and it makes sense why (a row of NULL would be really annoying, especially if you want to use the output as an exclusion list, because A NOT IN (SET(B,NULL)) always returns NULL, not TRUE. )

For example, say the output could include NULL. You could end up with something like the following, where even though the input value of A is not in the NOT IN list, no rows are returned:

Click through for more details.

Erik Darling shows the Collatz Conjecture in T-SQL:

The only problem in there that could really be written in SQL was the Collatz Conjecture. It states that when you take any number, and if it’s even you divide it by 2, and if it’s odd you multiply it by 3 and add 1, you’ll always eventually end up with 1. Fair enough. There’s probably a use for that out somewhere out there.

Writing it in SQL was super easy, of course. Just throw a CASE expression at it.

I think Erik is a little harsh on SQL as a mathematical language.  Yeah, there are other languages I’d go to first for many types of math problems (R, F#, and Python being examples), but SQL can solve quite a few mathematical problems.