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Stupid Coding Tricks: The T-SQL Mandelbrot

The bar for entry into CodeSOD is pretty straight forward: professionally-developed code that elicits that certain What The— reaction. Though there have been a few exceptions over the years, generally speaking, student code, hobbyist code, and amateur code need not apply. That said, I'd like to try something a little different today. Today's example is not technically professionally-developed, it's a Stupid Coding Trick.

"So I was bored at work one day," Graeme Job explains, "and wondered, what's the most useless thing I could do with my time without actually doing anything. Then it hit me. I could use T-SQL to generate... Mandelbrot."

Graeme continued, "Following is a single T-SQL SELECT statement that generates a text-representation of a Mandelbrot Set. The results are best viewed in text-mode."

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2016-09-02 (first published: )

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Question of the Day

The Range of Customers

I have this data in the OrderHeader table in a SQL Server 2025 database (ordered by CustomerID ASC):

orderid orderdate               customerid complete
3       2025-05-10 00:00:00.0002          1
21      2024-01-10 00:00:00.0003          1
15      2023-10-28 00:00:00.0004   1
13      2025-03-08 00:00:00.0006          1
11      2024-04-02 00:00:00.0007          1
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
 from dbo.OrderHeader
 where customerid between 3 and '6'

See possible answers