A Git tool that began at Microsoft and tunes clones of huge repositories for speed. It replaces VFS for Git, and Microsoft Learn points to it, Git LFS or Azure Artifacts when a repository grows too big.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Scalar in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Git
A distributed version control system. Anything kept in Git, prompts included, gains a history of authors, timestamps, diffs and tags, and changes can be reverted.
- Chat message roles
Labels on chat messages: instructions go under system, the person's input under user, the model's previous answers under assistant, and results returned by a called tool under tool (or function).
- VFS for Git
An older solution for enormous Git repositories: ordinary Git commands keep working while files are downloaded only when needed, over the GVFS protocol that Azure Repos supports.
- Git LFS
Git Large File Storage, an extension that keeps small pointer files in the repository while big binaries live elsewhere, and offers locking for files that cannot be diffed. Azure Repos supports it at no charge, but not over SSH.
- Azure Artifacts
Hosts Universal Packages, Cargo, Maven/Gradle, Python, npm and NuGet packages for Azure DevOps teams, in feeds that can draw on upstreams. Container images go elsewhere; GitHub Packages is the GitHub counterpart.
- Repository
A group of images or artefacts in a container registry that share one name and differ by tag. Names can include slash-separated namespaces, but every repository is handled separately.
Related terms
- File system monitor
Switched on by Scalar, it records which files changed recently so Git can avoid scanning every file in the working tree.
- GIN
PostgreSQL index that the book places on jsonb metadata columns; scalar filtering relies on B-tree and embeddings on vector indexes.
- GVFS protocol
Lets VFS for Git and Scalar work with enormous Azure Repos repositories by downloading objects on demand instead of all at clone time.
- Incremental repack
Scalar runs this in the background, merging Git pack files into fewer of them without blocking anything else.
- JSON_QUERY
Returns an array or object taken from JSON text. For scalar values JSON_VALUE is the right choice; using the other one by mistake simply yields NULL under lax mode.
- JSON_VALUE
A T-SQL function that pulls a single scalar, such as a string, number or Boolean, out of JSON. Objects and arrays need JSON_QUERY instead.
- Multi-pack-index
Speeds up object lookups by indexing many Git pack files together. For very large repositories Scalar turns it on, along with sparse-checkout, commit-graph and the file system monitor.
- Test conditions
Rules added to a SQL Server unit test action to judge its outcome, for example Row Count, Scalar Value, Expected Schema or Data Checksum. Freshly created tests include one marked Inconclusive.