SQL Tips #15 - How to use Coalesce

COALESCE is one of those magical functions that makes no sense to mere mortals - here it's used to concatenate row values into a single delimited string.

The Query

DECLARE @companies VARCHAR(1000)
SELECT @companies = COALESCE(@companies,'') + company + ';' 
FROM tblAccounts
print @companies

Disclaimer

These queries are provided as a guide, and are by no means perfect. I didn't write all of these - many are collated from MSDN documentation and community sources over the years.

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