Mauve (6/25/2010)

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UMG Developer (6/25/2010)

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Hugo Kornelis (6/25/2010)Please, people - NEVER USE CODE LIKE THIS IN PRODUCTION CODE!!!!

I agree, but I think variable concatenation is very commonly used, so it is important for people to understand that the ORDER BY clause can really cause you grief. (I think this relates to the running total examples that use local variables.) Personally I prefer using FOR XML to concatenate strings, but there are cases where it doesn't work. (Special characters as one example.)

Then the only proper method is to use a cursor, which will guarantee the result set, and concatenate the values returned by the cursor into the desired string.