T-SQL dialect of SQL doesn’t have aggregate functions for strings, but there is an easy workaround using magic of XML.
Consider Employees table of the Northwind database. When I run following query:
SELECT Country, FirstName FROM Employees ORDER BY Country, FirstName
I get following result:
Country FirstName UK Anne UK Michael UK Robert UK Steven USA Andrew USA Janet USA Laura USA Margaret USA Nancy
Now I want to combine first names into comma separated strings grouped by country. Continue reading →