Execute Dynamic SQL commands in SQL Server

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In some applications having hard-coded SQL statements is not appealing, because of the dynamic nature of the queries being issued against the database server. Because of this sometimes there is a need to dynamically create a SQL statement on the fly and then run that command. This can be done quite simply from the application perspective where the statement is built on the fly whether you are using ASP.NET , ColdFusion or any other programming language. But how do you do this from within a SQL Server stored procedure? SQL Server offers a few ways of running a dynamically built SQL statement. These ways are: Writing a query with parameters Using EXEC Using sp_executesql Writing a query with parameters This first approach is pretty straightforward if you only need to pass parameters into the WHERE clause of your SQL statement. Let’s say we need to find all records from the Customers table where City = ‘London’. This can be done easily as the following example shows. ...
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Convert Table To Pivot Table Using SQL Coalesce Operator

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Using Coalesce to Pivot If you run the following statement against the AdventureWorks database,

SELECT Name FROM HumanResources.Department WHERE (GroupName = 'Executive General and Administration')

you will come up with an expected result. You could run the following command if you want to pivot the data.

 DECLARE @DepartmentName VARCHAR(1000) 
 SELECT @DepartmentName = COALESCE(@DepartmentName,'') + Name + ',' FROM HumanResources.Department 
 WHERE (GroupName = 'Executive General and Administration') 
 SELECT @DepartmentName AS DepartmentNames

And get the result set with comma-separated in a single column.

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