I recently gave a talk at !!Con West about how you can use some of the dark corners of SQL to generate fractals. You can watch the recording here:
To summarize the video, I write SQL queries that generate two distinct classes of fractals:
- Escape-time fractals – A class of fractals based on repeatedly evaluating a formula at every point in a grid.
- Self-similar fractals – A class of fractals that can be described by what’s known as an “L-system“. An L-system encodes a fractal as an initial string and rules for modifying that string. It is then possible to decode the fractal from the string.
The primary SQL technique I use are recursive CTEs. I use recursive CTEs as a way to express iteration in my queries. With some work, I map both of the classes of fractals into SQL queries.
For escape-time fractals, I use one recursive CTE to iterate through every point in a grid. I then use a second recursive CTE to repeatedly evaluate a function over each point to test whether or not the point is part of the fractal.
For self-similar fractals, I wrote a SQL query that takes an arbitrary L-system. It runs a few iterations of the L-system and then maps the resulting string back to the fractal. Mapping the L-system to the final fractal is a bit tedious, but not too hard.
You can find all the queries I used in the talk here. Feel free to try them out yourself!