Databricks

Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, has 50 words for snow and ice. That’s - as they say - fake news, but the point made is metaphorical: When something is important to a people, their language finds a way to become efficient on that topic. SQL is a...

Motivation Note: You can find all examples to run here. In past posts, we discussed parameter markers that you can use to templatize queries. Given a simple example table: CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE residents( first_name STRING, last_name STRING,...

It’s not often that a DBMS surprises me when it comes to SQL; I kind of think I have seen it all. However there is this one feature in Spark SQL that made me go: “Huh! Now that’s cool!” when I first encountered it. In fact, I am baffled that, as far ...

Motivation In Databricks, you have many means to compose and execute queries. You can: Incrementally build a query and execute it using the DataFrame APIUse Python, Scala, or some supported other language to glue together a SQL string and use spark....

This is an article about a humble and ancient SQL token: The asterisk, aka "star", aka "*". Not to be confused with Asterix the Gaulle, for him I recommend a decent bookstore. It's also an article about how I'm humbled by the secrets Spark SQL holds ...