I recently worked with a large set of accounting transactions. I needed to split those rows into multiple logical batches, but each batch had to be logically consistent – among other things, those batches had to be properly balanced, because accounting people are kind of fussy like that.
So I designed a little T-SQL logic that would split all of those transactions into evenly sized batches, without violating their logical groupings.
Safety glasses on. Let’s dive in.
The GO keyword isn’t strictly speaking T-SQL – it’s really just a batch terminator used in Management Studio and other tools. But did you know that you can use GO to run a batch multiple times?
Turns out, GO has an optional numeric argument that specifies how many times you want to repeat the batch.
SELECT GETDATE() AS currentDateTime; GO 5
With a little bit of imagination, you could for instance use this to replace dreary old WHILE loops, to populate test values into tables or run a stored procedure multiple times to test performance.