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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 ##MS_DatabaseConnector## User

On SQL Server 2025, I run this code as a sysadmin:

CREATE LOGIN Demo WITH PASSWORD = 'Demo1234567'
GO
ALTER SERVER ROLE ##MS_DatabaseConnector## ADD MEMBER Demo
GO
I then login as Demo and run this:
USE sandbox
go
SELECT CURRENT_USER
What is returned?

See possible answers