If you’ve worked with reporting, you’ve probably come across the following problem. You have a list of values, say “A, B, C, D, K, L, M, N, R, S, T, U, Z” that you want to display in a more user-friendly, condensed manner, “A-D, K-N, R-U, Z”.
Today, we’re going to look at how you can accomplish this in T-SQL, and what this has to do with window functions and gaps and islands.
Continue readingA common reporting scenario is that your report has to concatenate an aggregate of string values from rows. Many other database platforms even have built-in aggregate functions that will concatenate text for you (like LISTAGG() on Oracle). In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can achieve the same results in T-SQL, using the APPLY operator and the XML datatype.
In this short tutorial, we’ll look at traversing parent-child structures using recursive common table expressions, and turning the data into human-readable lists. This is a great way to represent paths and hierarchy-based data in reports and end-user outputs.
This article will show you how to create a “top 10” list of data, as well as providing an aggregate on the remainder of the data. There are a few different approaches to this.
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