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title What is Java Language Extension?
description In SQL Server 2019, Java, Python, and R are supported language extensions. Language Extensions are a feature of SQL Server used for executing external code. Relational data can be used in the external code using the extensibility framework.
author cawrites
ms.author chadam
ms.date 10/06/2020
ms.topic overview
ms.prod sql
ms.technology language-extensions
monikerRange >=sql-server-ver15||>=sql-server-linux-ver15||=sqlallproducts-allversions

What is Java Language Extension?

[!INCLUDE SQL Server 2019 and later]

Language Extensions is a feature of SQL Server used for executing external code. The relational data can be used in the external code using the extensibility framework.

In SQL Server 2019, Java is supported. The default Java runtime is Zulu Open JRE. You can also use another Java JRE or SDK.

Note

For executing Python or R in SQL Server, see the SQL machine learning documentation. With SQL Server 2019 and later, you can use a custom Python and R runtime with Language Extensions. For more information, see the Python custom runtime and the R custom runtime.

What you can do with Language Extensions

Language Extensions uses the extensibility framework for executing external code. Code execution is isolated from the core engine processes, but fully integrated with SQL Server query execution. You can execute code at the data's source, eliminating the need to pull data across the network.

External languages are defined with CREATE EXTERNAL LANGUAGE. The system stored procedure sp_execute_external_script is used as the interface for executing the code.

Language Extensions provide various advantages:

  • Data security. Bringing external language execution closer to the source of data avoids wasteful or insecure data movement.
  • Speed. Databases are optimized for set-based operations. Recent innovations in databases such as in-memory tables make summaries and aggregations lightning, and are a perfect complement to data science.
  • Ease of deployment and integration. [!INCLUDEssNoVersion] is the central point of operations for many other data management tasks and applications. By using data in the database, you ensure that the data used by Java is consistent and up-to-date.

How to get started

Step 1: Install the software

Step 2: Configure a development tool

Developers typically write code on their own laptop or development workstation. With language extensions in SQL Server, there's no need to change this process. After installation is complete, you can run Java code on SQL Server.

Step 3: Write your first code

Execute Java code from within T-SQL script:

Limitations

  • The number of values in input and output buffers can't exceed MAX_INT (2^31-1) since that is the maximum number of elements that can be allocated in an array in Java.

Next steps