Wacky Ideas – Curated SQL

Building a Rubik’s Cube in Power Apps

Published 2025-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

This time however, the Power Hour led me to come fully clean to my colleagues, by attempting to build a Rubik’s Cube emulator within a Canvas Power App.

For this week’s blog, I’ll take you for a brief tour of its inner workings, and share the code with you for yourself to play around with.

Click through for the code and explanation.

In the meantime, I’ll share a family secret on how we solve Rubik’s cubes. We remove the wrong stickers and swap them with the correct ones. Boom, problem solved. Also, this is getting the most coveted category I have to offer on Curated SQL, so good on Jon.

Maxing Out on Stored Procedure Parameters

Published 2025-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson tries it out:

So I replied: “Challenge Accepted”, well, actually I replied with a gif of Neo saying it, but the effect was the same. So, I decided to just see, what would that look like. Coincidentally I am testing the new template for the Simple Talk site, and a function with 2100 parameters seemed like some code that screams out: “BIG!” Testing is should always be about pressing the limits of your code, so why not.

It turns out that you cannot have 2101 parameters in a single stored procedure definition. But this is definitely an example of Swart’s 10% Rule. It also nets Louis my most coveted category: Wacky Ideas.

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Fun with Query Timeouts

Published 2024-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Forrest McDaniel gets my most coveted category:

I love how there are lots of little things to SQL Server – mostly ignored details that only sometimes matter but make sense when you stare at them. Actually, I’m not sure I love them. I forget about them, and then stub my toe on them. Occasionally though, there’s a quirky combination that leads to bloggable shenanigans.

Let’s start with Detail Number One, which has most definitely tripped me up: queries that are returning rows won’t time out. You might be familiar with connections using a default 30s timeout, but as long the query is returning a row every 29s, the client won’t time it out. You can even test this in SSMS.

Read on to see how Forrest takes advantage of this, uh, capability.

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Building Connect 4 with T-SQL

Published 2023-11-06 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun figures out a useful way to play a game while looking like you’re doing important work:

Connect 4 is a classical board game, consisting of a board of 6 rows and 7 columns and 42 tokens (of two colours, each player with 21). The first player to get four tokens in a row, column or diagonally, wins!

Simple game rules:
1. only one token can be added at the time
2. each player have their own colour (sign) of tokens
3. the game is ended, when the first player connects four tokens in a row, column or diagonally

Actually, I take that back: Tomaz has figured out a useful way for two people to play a game while looking like they’re doing important work. That’s twice as good.

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The Observer Effect with Extended Events

Published 2023-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias measures the measurer:

SQL Server 2022 offers a new feature enhancement to Extended Events that allows it to now track the performance and publishing metrics of the events that have been enabled in an event session that is running on the server. Four new columns were added in the sys.dm_xe_session_events DMV in SQL Server 2022 that provide additional information about the event publishing performance metrics when an event session is running:

This fits more in the “wacky ideas” category than a sensible thing to do, but it can give you a better idea of how expensive certain events are.

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Plotting an ASCII Bar Chart using SQL

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder is speaking my language:

No need for expensive Tableau subscriptions. Ditch Microsoft Excel. Just use native PostgreSQL to quickly visualise your data!
Here’s an idea I had for a while. As you may know, jOOQ can produce fancy charts from your jOOQ results. But that requires you use jOOQ, and you may not be using jOOQ, because you’re not coding in Java/Kotlin/Scala (otherwise, you’d be using jOOQ). That’s OK. I thought, why not do it with SQL (PostgreSQL, to be specific) directly, then?

This one’s getting my most coveted category: Wacky Ideas.

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Printing ggplot2 Plots as Receipts

Published 2022-04-06 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Rudis has fun with a Point of Sale printer:

At the end of March, I caught a fleeting tweet that showcased an Epson thermal receipt printer generating a new “ticket” whenever a new GitHub issue was filed on a repository. @aschmelyun documents it well in this blog post. It’s a pretty cool hack, self-contained on a Pi Zero.
Andrew’s project birthed an idea: could I write an R package that will let me plot {ggplot2}/{grid} objects to it? The form factor of the receipt printer is tiny (~280 “pixels” wide), but the near infinite length of the paper means one can play with some data visualizations that cannot be done in other formats (and it would be cool to be able to play with other content to print to it in and outside of R).

Read on for a fun story which gets an entry in my most coveted category. H/T R-Bloggers

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Tower of Hanoi in T-SQL

Published 2021-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun would like to play a game:

T-SQL Code for the popular game of “Tower of Hanoi”, that can be played in Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Data Studio or any other T-SQL editor with support of query execution.

Given that this is the game you use to teach students recursion, I figured a T-SQL based solution would be interesting. Well, Tomaz has the solution and the workspace to play it yourself.

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Building 2048 in T-SQL

Published 2021-11-30 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun gives you a way to slack off at work while everybody else thinks you’re working on a really important SQL problem:

What is 2048 game? It is a classical puzzle game, that is easy and fun to play. The objective of the game is to move the numbers (tiles in the matrix/board) in a way to combine them to create a tile with the number 2048.

Click through to see how to use it and check out the scripts on Tomaz’s GitHub repo. This definitely merits the Wacky Ideas category.

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Fun with GO and Preventing SQL Batches from Parsing

Published 2021-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky has an apropos post for Friday the 13th:

In a previous post, Prevent Full Script Execution (Understanding and Using PARSEONLY and NOEXEC), I explained how to easily disable a script using the PARSEONLY session setting. That same method can be used to disable one or more sections within a script instead of the entire script. But in either case, “disabling” doesn’t mean that the script, or section of code, will be skipped entirely as if it wasn’t there. It will still be parsed by SQL Server as that is not something that can be turned off. This means that you could still see parsing errors related to undeclared variables, syntax errors, etc.
Then one day I tried something silly that I figured wouldn’t work but wanted to try anyway (because quite often you don’t know until you know), and it actually did work (for the most part). I found a way to fully disable an entire T-SQL batch, and there really isn’t any indication that it happened. However, this “technique” is more limited than PARSEONLY as it only works on individual batches, and it only works in some environments.

Read on to see how you can use the GO operator to prevent many SQL Server client tools from even noticing a block of text.

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Category: Wacky Ideas