SQL Tricks and Concepts You Didn't Know About

Abstract

Did you know that some SQL variants are Turing complete and let you write any program in SQL? Of course, no one’s that crazy… But what are the limits of SQL? What are some crazy things we can do with it? I’m going to go over a few of them in this talk. It won’t be only fun stuff, though! I’m going to show some more practical but lesser-known concepts too. Let’s discover some hidden SQL traits together!

Resources

• Madlebrot Set implemented in T-SQL

• Brainfuck interpreter SQLite

• Brainfuck interpreter with procedures in T-SQL

• ltree Docs

• Looking inside postgres at a gist index by Pat Shaughnessy

• Saving a tree in postgres using ltree by Pat Shaughnessy

• How SQL Server handles recursive CTEs

• Oracle docs on the Model caluse