A New Operator

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A New Operator

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Points: 740201
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December 1, 2025 at 12:00 am

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edmil SSC Enthusiast Points: 195 More actions · Answer 1

How do a bunch of people in a design meeting sitting around a table have a conversation like this:

"Let's add a new concatenation operator to T-SQL. We don't really need one and there are lots of things we do need but this will be fun."

"Good idea, let's use '||'"

"In all our other languages that is the 'OR' operator so it will be counter-intuitive."

"That's why it's the perfect choice!"

--- Everybody laughing ---

"Done!"

ewm2

Jeffrey Williams SSC Guru Points: 90351 More actions · Answer 2

edmil wrote:

How do a bunch of people in a design meeting sitting around a table have a conversation like this:
"Let's add a new concatenation operator to T-SQL. We don't really need one and there are lots of things we do need but this will be fun."
"Good idea, let's use '||'"
"In all our other languages that is the 'OR' operator so it will be counter-intuitive."
"That's why it's the perfect choice!"
--- Everybody laughing ---
"Done!"

Not quite - in other SQL languages and ANSI SQL the double-pipe operator is the default string concatenation operator. So - basically we have the team sitting around and saying:

"It has only been 30+ years that we have not implemented the default concatenation operator - we have nothing better to do so let's do that now!"

Jeffrey Williams
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”

― Charles R. Swindoll

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edmil SSC Enthusiast Points: 195 More actions · Answer 3

Thanks for the lesson. I am developer first but have used SQL Server since 6.5, Sybase, Mongo DB (doesn't really count for this discussion), MySQL, and Postgres. I have never used the || operator in any of them but now I know. I'll probably throw it in some code just to confuse people - taking my lead from MS.

ewm2

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 740201 More actions · Answer 4

FYI: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azuresqlblog/announcing-unistr-and--operator-in-azure-sql-database-%E2%80%93-preview/4157714

SADSAC SSCrazy Points: 2535 More actions · Answer 5

Remember using this in DB2 on a mainframe in the 90's.

In DB2, it was CONCAT for strings and OR for numerical values

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 740201 More actions · Answer 6

SADSAC wrote:

Remember using this in DB2 on a mainframe in the 90's.
In DB2, it was CONCAT for strings and OR for numerical values

Gotta love standards, especially when vendors pick and choose?