Over the last couple of months I've been getting a lot more acquainted with Microsoft's latest tool for working with databases, SQL Operations Studio. It's a free tool for working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and Azure SQL Datawarehouse which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and is based on Visual Studio Code which, for anyone who knows me, is pretty much my favourite editor at the moment.
What I wanted to quickly cover off here is one of the very neat little features which makes understanding your query results a little easier. The ability to chart them.
Using a sample database I have locally, which was created from the Movie Dataset from Kaggle, I've written a simple SQL query to see how many movies Samuel L. Jackson has been in each year and what the average rating was for his movies in that year.
Before any movie buffs write in, the data set isn't complete so the number won't be completely accurate.
Scrolling through data like this is never pleasant even when you know what you're looking at. Fortunately over on the right hand side of the results is an option to visualise it. Incidentally, the other options there are to export the results to Excel, JSON and CSV, all of which are incredibly useful themselves.
Which then gives us something which might give us a better idea of what we're looking at.
This particular view doesn't really tell us much other than he's had a number of years where his movies are rated well, and not many years when they're rated poorly (maybe it's says something else as well? Comment and let me know).
The software is still under development and is a bit rough around the edges, but it's a useful tool and certainly one to keep an eye on if you're doing anything with SQL databases.