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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

BIT_COUNT II

In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:

UserID  UserPermissions
15
23
37
4       NULL
What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount
from dbo.UserPermission
where UserID = 4;

See possible answers