Over the past several (or pervious if you have been following along) articles, I have explored the use of special characters in certain database scenarios. Using these special characters brings certain fun and flare to your hum drum naming schemes. In addition to the fun, there comes a little bit of extra peculiarities to ensure everything works as expected.
While figuring out some examples, I found myself searching for good reliable sources constantly. I also found myself trying to find various emojis that would work well to represent one idea or another. Sometimes, the effort paid off, and sometimes it seemed frivolous.
If only there was an easy comprehensive source to search through all available unicode characters for SQL Server. Then a thought occurred to me. Why not create my own database with these characters?
Laying the Groundwork
After determining that a database would work best locally to make it easier to research these characters, I quickly determined that I would need to figure out how to write a powershell script so I could scrape a list of characters from a website. That should be easy, right?
With a sample such as that, I just need to figure out how to pull the image for each character and the unicode value of each. Next task to figure out is where can i find some decent powershell examples on the web that would do a similar task.
In addition to figuring out how to do the powershell end of this, there is the database side of things. What should the table design be for this kind of data? Which values and attributes should be stored? Am I overthinking this? Is this too much work?
Well, this is indeed far too much work. Especially given this awesome gem I found while trying to find the exact reference link I was looking for in one of the pervious articles. You see, as it turns out Solomon Rutzky had already done all (and I really do mean all) of the heavy lifting for this when he wrote a function that will do exactly what I was looking to do – here. The function that Solomon created will return all 188,657 code points that are usable in SQL Server.
Now, instead of building out a script to import the data from somewhere else, I just need to employ the use of this fabulous script and move on with all the oodles of time I was spared.
Put a bow on it
Playing around with emojis in a database is a fun endeavor. Not only is it fun to play with for personal growth, but it does have some business advantages. We live in an era were these emojis are popping up everywhere and are even being stored long term in many databases. I view it as a great opportunity to improve your skill set and better your career for the future.
Interested in learning about some deep technical information instead? Check these out!
Want to learn more about your indexes? Try this index maintenance article or this index size article.
This is the twelfth article in the 2019 “12 Days of Christmas” series. For the full list of articles, please visit this page.
*Previous has been intentionally mis-spelled throughout this article as “pervious” as an ode to a fat finger mistake in a recent article.
