The SQL Server 2016 release introduced the SQL Server Extensibility Framework (EF), which gives us the ability to, from inside SQL Server, execute code in an external language runtime environment. SQL Server 2016 supports R as external runtime, and Microsoft added Python to supported runtimes in the SQL Server 2017 release. The important part about the EF is that the runtime is outside of the core database engine, but we call it from inside SQL Server via the stored procedure sp_execute_external_script. We can push data from SQL Server queries to the external runtime, and consume data, (resultsets, output parameters) from the external runtime back in SQL Server.
NOTE: You can read more about the actual implementation of the external runtimes and
sp_execute_external_scriptin my SQL Server R Services Series posts.
In SQL Server 2019 Microsoft added the ability to execute custom Java code along the same lines we execute R and Python, and this blog post intends to give an introduction of how to install and enable the Java extension, as well as execute some very basic Java code. In future posts, I drill down how to pass data back and forth between SQL Server and Java.
To see what other posts there are in the series, go to SQL Server 2019 Extensibility Framework & Java.