In last week’s Query Exercise, I challenged you to play some code golf to generate big spills with tiny T-SQL.
Today, I’m going to walk you through my thought process – the initial attempts I tried and failed with, and the discoveries I made along the way, because I think it makes for fun storytelling.
In the past, when I’ve seen people trying to generate a lot of data quickly, they’ve cross-joined SQL Server’s built-in system tables like sys.all_objects or sys.all_columns. The more times you cross-join them with each other, the more rows you create with a cartesian join. However,