Eric Wahner-345205 (12/6/2012)

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There are somethings that SQL does quite well and then there are somethings that .NET does well. What my approach attempts to do is simplify it so that you don't have to write a custom procedure for every PIVOT that you do. I too have used dynamic sql to solve this problem as well, and while I haven't done any performance testing to see which one performs better than the other, I can say that there should be fewer trips to the database with the CLR method.

This was more of an educational post to show how it could be done using a CLR procedure. I leave it up to the community to decide if this works for them or not.

Eric Wahner-345205 (12/6/2012)

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I would agree when you are using known and predictable values like a set of dates or even dates that haven't occurred, creating a PIVOT in SQL is quite simple. This exercise was for those types of collections of data that are "dynamic" and ever changing. When you have an unpredictable set of data that you need to pivot, you really have no other choice.

Eric Wahner-345205 (12/6/2012)

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@jcrawf02

I think you confused my point with using a PIVOT vs dynamic PIVOT. When I said you have no choice, I was referring to doing a dynamic PIVOT. If you have unpredictable results you cannot write a PIVOT query without using dynamic sql to select the distinct rows that will ultimately be your columns.