T-SQL Tuesday #137: Using Notebooks Every Day

This is my 8th TSQLTuesday, and this month Steve Jones has invited us to write about Jupyter Notebooks.

I’ve been aware of Notebooks for a little while, but didn’t really know what they were or how to get started with them. Then I attended a talk a few years ago by Rich Benner on Azure Data Studio, which was really interesting in its own right, but also included the ability to create and edit notebooks.

After that I got a bit more interested, and had a bit of a play and did a bit of research. I could see a few use cases for them that other people had written about, things like creating a notebook to pass to the DBAs/admins to run on live and save with the results in as a way to easily do some basic troubleshooting or analysis on a production system

This seemed really appealing at the time, as I was working somewhere where devs were expected to troubleshoot issues on live databases without being able to access them. However, the organisation I was part of moved very slowly and the chances of notebooks or ADS being adopted any time soon was pretty slim so that was, unfortunately, a bit of a non-starter.

Since then I’ve continued to have a play every once in a while, but I’ve never been anywhere where the people around me were much interested, and without that it’s quite hard to get traction with this sort of thing.

I have found one use, however, and that’s as a set of notes for myself.

Recently I was looking to explain to someone about some of the newer syntax that’s available in T-SQL (and when I say newer I mean anything post 2008). I did a quick bit of research and realised there was plenty that I’d forgotten about and didn’t use even when it could be useful for me, so I set up a notebook to very briefly explain the new functionality and include some basic examples. It’s not complete, but you can find it in my GitHub repo.

Going forward I plan on adding a few more notebooks there to help me keep track of any other bits of syntax that I either forget exist or have to research every time I need to use it. I’m thinking one for XML and another for JSON might be really handy, as well as one for all the aggregation/windowing function options. If I can get motivated enough (and that can be a big if) this will hopefully grow into kind of a mini books online, but personalised for me to help me remember the things I need to know.