Give the New PIVOT and UNPIVOT Commands in SQL Server 2005 a Whirl
Sometimes it's the little things that can simplify your life the most. Learn to combine SQL Server's PIVOT and UNPIVOT commands with Common Table Expressions to make your T-SQL code easier to read and produce more useful crosstabbed results.
by Michael Jones
May 20, 2005
any major product releases have a dizzyingly long list of new features and enhancements—often introduced atop a product that is in many cases so complex and feature-ridden that it's already difficult to keep up with the breadth of the product. However, the wide feature sets also mean that most developers find small nuggets of functionality that often have a significant impact on their jobs, if only to make life a little simpler. It is in these nuggets that I think many developers first come to appreciate new product releases.
For me, two particularly interesting new features of Microsoft's upcoming release of SQL Server 2005 are its new PIVOT and UNPIVOT commands. From a manager's perspective, pivoting provides a considerably simpler view of data, truly transforming it into information. From a developer's perspective, the features let you rotate row data into columns in the query response to create pivoted or "crosstabbed" views of query results.
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any major product releases have a dizzyingly long list of new features and enhancements—often introduced atop a product that is in many cases so complex and feature-ridden that it's already difficult to keep up with the breadth of the product. However, the wide feature sets also mean that most developers find small nuggets of functionality that often have a significant impact on their jobs, if only to make life a little simpler. It is in these nuggets that I think many developers first come to appreciate new product releases.
