A Little Mischief

Every now and then, I like to stir up a little mischief.

Sometimes I’ll go into Starbucks and order an Iced Personal Half-Caff Quad Venti Extra-Vanilla Nonfat One-Sugar Two-Honey With-Whip No-Foam Latte, just to see what kind of reaction I get. (Seriously… I really do).

The vast majority of baristas will stare back at me with a vacant expression and say, “Er… Whu-ut?” Some will just smile or laugh out loud, knowing I’m just kidding around. But on rare occasions, a barista will come right back at me without batting an eyelash and ask with all seriousness, “Do you want a Petite Reduced-Fat Cinnamon Old-Fashioned Zucchini-Walnut Muffin with that?”

They aren’t as much fun.

SQL Server is kind of like that type of barista. It’s not fun trying to get a reaction out of SQL Server. It’s hard to trip it up. The other day, for kicks, I wrote up an obnoxious, impossible-to-understand query (see below), and SQL processed it without question. Occasionally, I think it’d be kind of cool for SQL to be in on the joke and come back with a message saying, “Oh, come ON… Get real!”

/* Initialize */ 
if object_id('tempdb..#from') is not null drop table #from; 
go 
 

/* The 'mischief' query: */ 
 
with [top] as (select [top]=100),[where]( 
 
[select],[top100],[percent],[into],[order], 
[from],[employees], 
[over],[partition],[by],[column], 
[go] 
)as( 
 
select EmployeeID,null,FirstName 
      ,LastName,ReportsTo,City 
      ,HireDate,1,1,5,null,Title 
  from Northwind.dbo.Employees) 
 
select top (select [top] from [top])  
percent [percent] as [as], [sum]=sum ([over]) over( 
partition by [partition],[by]), 
[into] into #from from [where] where  
[order]=[by] order by [order],[by], 
[go]; 
go