SQL Server supports transforming flat tabular SQL result sets into hierarchical structures by convention using the convenient FOR XML or FOR JSON syntaxes. This is really convenient and less verbose than the standard SQL/XML or SQL/JSON APIs - although the standard ones are more powerful. In this blog post, I'd like to show a few … Continue reading Using SQL Server FOR XML and FOR JSON Syntax on Other RDBMS With jOOQ
Tag: PostgreSQL
What’s Faster? COUNT(*) or COUNT(1)?
One of the biggest and undead myths in SQL is that COUNT(*) is faster than COUNT(1). Or was it that COUNT(1) is faster than COUNT(*)? Impossible to remember, because there's really no reason at all why one should be faster than the other. But is the myth justified? Let's measure! How does COUNT(...) work? But … Continue reading What’s Faster? COUNT(*) or COUNT(1)?
Using DISTINCT ON in Non-PostgreSQL Databases
A nice little gem in PostgreSQL's SQL syntax is the DISTINCT ON clause, which is as powerful as it is esoteric. In a previous post, we've blogged about some caveats to think of when DISTINCT and ORDER BY are used together. The bigger picture can be seen in our article about the logical order of … Continue reading Using DISTINCT ON in Non-PostgreSQL Databases
Calculate Percentiles to Learn About Data Set Skew in SQL
B-Tree indexes are perfect when your data is uniformly distributed. They are not really useful, when you have skewed data. I'll explain later why this is the case, but let's first learn how to detect "skew" What is skew? Skew is a term from statistics when a normal distribution is not symmetric. The example given … Continue reading Calculate Percentiles to Learn About Data Set Skew in SQL
How to Reduce Syntactic Overhead Using the SQL WINDOW Clause
SQL is a verbose language, and one of the most verbose features are window functions. In a stack overflow question that I've encountered recently, someone asked to calculate the difference between the first and the last value in a time series for any given day: Input volume tstamp --------------------------- 29011 2012-12-28 09:00:00 28701 2012-12-28 10:00:00 … Continue reading How to Reduce Syntactic Overhead Using the SQL WINDOW Clause
PostgreSQL 11’s Support for SQL Standard GROUPS and EXCLUDE Window Function Clauses
Exciting discovery when playing around with PostgreSQL 11! New SQL standard window function clauses have been supported. If you want to play with this, you can do so very easily using docker: docker pull postgres:11 docker run --name POSTGRES11 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres -d postgres:11 docker run -it --rm --link POSTGRES11:postgres postgres psql -h postgres -U postgres … Continue reading PostgreSQL 11’s Support for SQL Standard GROUPS and EXCLUDE Window Function Clauses
Selecting all Columns Except One in PostgreSQL
Google's BigQuery has a very interesting SQL language feature, which I've missed many times in other databases: select: SELECT [{ ALL | DISTINCT }] { [ expression. ]* [ EXCEPT ( column_name [, ...] ) ] [ REPLACE ( expression [ AS ] column_name [, ...] ) ] | expression [ [ AS ] alias … Continue reading Selecting all Columns Except One in PostgreSQL
Calculating Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula With SQL
A really geeky way to start a Monday morning is to be nerd-sniped by the cool Fermat's Library twitter account... https://twitter.com/fermatslibrary/status/960154478224793600 ... reading up on the cool Tupper's Self-Referential Formula thinking "Can This be Done in SQL?™" As we all know from a previous article, SQL is turing complete, so the answer must be yes. … Continue reading Calculating Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula With SQL
JOIN Elimination: An Essential Optimiser Feature for Advanced SQL Usage
The SQL language has one great advantage over procedural, object oriented, and "ordinary" functional programming languages. The fact that it is truly declarative (i.e. a 4GL / fourth generation programming language) means that a sophisticated optimiser can easily transform one SQL expression into another, equivalent SQL expression, which might be faster to execute. How does … Continue reading JOIN Elimination: An Essential Optimiser Feature for Advanced SQL Usage
How to Find Redundant Indexes in SQL
The following two indexes are redundant in most SQL databases: CREATE INDEX i_actor_1 ON actor (last_name); CREATE INDEX i_actor_2 ON actor (last_name, first_name); It is usually safe to drop the first index, because all queries that query the LAST_NAME column only can still profit from the second index I_ACTOR_2. The reason being that LAST_NAME is … Continue reading How to Find Redundant Indexes in SQL