INT

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DBX-DEP

Each book explains INT in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• VALUES

  Returns in DAX the distinct column values, or table rows, still visible after filters are applied, sometimes with an extra blank entry. CALCULATE often takes the result as a table filter.

Related terms

• ANSI

  The American National Standards Institute, which made SQL a standard in 1986, a year before ISO did. Its standard types, for example INT, DECIMAL and VARCHAR, explain why SQL looks much the same from one vendor to another, even though each has its own dialect.

• ANSI mode

  A stricter Spark SQL behaviour, enabled by default since Apache Spark 4.0 (so also in Fabric Runtime 2.0), where a bad cast or an integer overflow fails the query rather than quietly producing null. Functions such as try_cast, try_add and try_divide keep the old null result, while switching ANSI mode off should be treated as a temporary workaround.

• Data type

  A rule limiting what a column may contain, for example INT for integers, DECIMAL for numbers with fractions or VARCHAR for text of varying length. Which types exist depends on the database product.

• DATEDIFF

  A T-SQL function that counts how many datepart boundaries lie between two dates, rather than how many complete units have passed, and returns the signed result as int. For a bigint result, use DATEDIFF_BIG.

• Dynamic range partition

  Parallel reading for the Copy activity, achieved by carving an integer or date/datetime column into slices and running one query per slice. The upper and lower values only decide slice width, never which rows are copied, and hand-written SQL needs the ?DfDynamicRangePartitionCondition placeholder.

• hash function

  Produces an INTEGER from the arguments given to it, and the outcome varies with their data types. For a cryptographic digest, use something like sha2 instead.

• Partition option

  Controls whether a Copy activity reads a relational source in parallel. The default, None, sends one query; Physical partitions of table uses the partitions defined on the table; Dynamic range splits reads by ranges of an integer or date/datetime column. Degree of copy parallelism sets how many reads happen at once.

• ROWVERSION

  A binary column type whose value updates by itself every time its row changes. Copy job can use it, or datetime, date, integer and string-as-datetime columns, as the watermark for incremental copies.