Working with dependencies, particularly recursive dependencies, may not always be entirely intuitive, but it could be critical knowledge in your database development work. This article focuses primarily on different ways of visualizing dependencies and how to loop through them using recursive common table expressions.
Tag: common table expression
Using DELETE on subqueries and common table expressions
Here’s an interesting feature I found in the code of a colleague the other day. A common task in T-SQL is eliminating duplicate records. This became a lot easier with the introduction of windowed functions way back in SQL Server 2005, such as ROW_NUMBER(), but it turns out, I’ve still been missing out on a really simple and cool solution.
Execution order of non-deterministic functions
Here’s a strange insight that I gained when building a test case where I needed some randomized values. In order to generate random values, you can use the NEWID() function, which creates a uniqueidentifier value for each row. But NEWID() comes with a strange behaviour, that some (including me) will consider a bug, while others (including the SQL Server development team) consider it to be “by design”.