recursive – sqlsunday.com

Optimizing a string split and search

We’re no strangers to doing things in T-SQL that would perhaps be more efficient in a procedural language. Love it or hate it, a T-SQL solution is easier in some situations, like my sp_ctrl3 procedure that I use as a drop-in replacement for the standard sp_help procedure to display object information in a way that simplifies copying and pasting.

One of the things that sp_ctrl3 does is plaintext database search. If you pass a string to the procedure that does not match an existing object, it’ll just perform a plaintext search of all SQL modules (procedure, views, triggers, etc) for that string. The search result includes line numbers for each result, so it needs to split each module into lines.

I’ve found that this takes a very long time to run in a database with large stored procedures, so here’s how I tuned it to run faster.

Catching circular references in parent-child structures

A popular form of organizing dimensions is in parent-child structures, also known as “unbalanced” or “ragged” dimensions, because any branch can have an arbitrary number of child levels. There are many advantages to this type of representation, but their recursive nature also brings some challenges. In this post, we’re going to look at circular references, and how you can trap them before they run out of control.

HASH JOIN deep-dive

Among the three different types of join operators used by SQL Server, the HASH JOIN does some of the hardest work. It scales pretty well and is very suitable for parallel processing. As such, it can be very powerful in many applications, but hash joins can potentially consume quite a bit of memory, so seeing on in your query plan could be an indicator of a performance tuning issue in your query or data.

Accumulating values in a parent-child hierarchy

Last week, we looked at how to construct a visual representation of a hierarchy stored as a parent-child table. The obvious next step is to accumulate values stored on those nodes using this hierarchy.

An indented representation of a parent-child hierarchy

When you’re designing reports, they can often be based on hiearchies represented by “nodes” in a parent-child setup. To the end-user, the parent-child representation doesn’t provide very much readability, so you need to output this information in a human-readable form, for instance in a table where the names/titles are indented.

Splitting a range string into a table

This week’s post is a requirement that I see very regularly as a developer. You get a plaintext string containing one or more ranges. Each range is comma delimited, and the start and end values of the range are separated by a dash. The string could look something like this, for example: 100-120,121-499,510,520,790-999.

Wouldn’t it be practical if we could construct a table value function that returns one row for each range, with columns for the start and end of each range?

Traversing parent-child relations

In this short tutorial, we’ll look at traversing parent-child structures using recursive common table expressions, and turning the data into human-readable lists. This is a great way to represent paths and hierarchy-based data in reports and end-user outputs.