TedDallas

If you liked Delphi then Lazarus is a great open source alternative for WYSIWYG Linux and Windows forms based application programming.

Recently I used it to create a little SQL editor with syntax highlighting for Maria DB. It only took a few hours which was mostly due to me trying to remember my Pascal syntax.

Lazarus also has a nice online package manager with a 1.5 zillion components available.

Object Pascal can feel antiquated. But Free Pascal remains fast, stable, and reasonably feature rich without much syntax bloat over the years.

Er ... SQL Server Management Studio is based on Visual Studio shell, and it does a fine job debugging stored procedures. I also code in C# and agree it also works well for that.

Recursion in SQL is one of the questions I always ask Data Engineers during interviews. The answer in MS T-SQL is to use a recursive CTE. It is not a common problem, but it comes up once in a while. Using a CTE is a better solution than calling an SP recursively because you can only nest 32 calls deep. In the MS Azure SQL Data Warehouse product you are simply fucked if you need to do recursion.

Nice documentation. Ada looks a lot like Pascal. It is interesting that SPARK is a subset of subset of Ada.

--A T-SQL version

  Select Case When SomeNumber % 3 = 0 and SomeNumber % 5 = 0 Then 'FizzBuzz'
              When SomeNumber % 3 = 0 Then 'Fizz'
              When SomeNumber % 5 = 0 Then 'Buzz'
              Else Convert(VarChar(10), SomeNumber)
              End As Answer
  From (
      Select Top 100 
          SomeNumber = Row_Number() Over (Order By [object_id]) 
      From sys.all_objects
  ) as Answers

Data structures - knowing your basic data structures will help you chose the right path for the use case. Even in SQL it is helpful to understand B-Trees.