I'm never very good at these historical questions 🙁

Sean Lange (10/21/2014)

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A cte does NOT require it to start with a semicolon. The semicolon is statement terminator not a statement beginninator (nod to Lynn Pettis for that phrase). A...

Stewart "Arturius" Campbell (10/15/2014)

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Enough nitpicking.

yes, the question used a reserved keyword for a column name (purely by mishap, i'm sure).

but, despite that little inconvenience, the idea behind the question was...

It would be...

Hugo Kornelis (10/1/2014)

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There actually is a reliable set-based way to do this, even though it does involve a bit of trickery, and some voodoo black magic (aka XML):

SELECT STUFF((SELECT ',...

The question was changed after some of the grumpy replies were posted. Originally, the answer was far...

RLilj33 (10/1/2014)

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I was thrown off by the values in the question. It states:

If I have this data?

CustomerID Sales

1 ...

The question includes example data. And the required result set. Unfortunately the result set cannot be obtained from the data.

It's clearly an error, and Steve will be along sooner or...

Interesting. Though the issue appears to be with applying functions to the Order By, which I don't think I've tried. I've certainly used this method successfully for many years -...

If you think that then I suggest you re-read the question!

Hugo Kornelis (9/30/2014)

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If you don't care whether the final returned value is 123, 321, 312, or even just 1 or 2 or 3, then yeah, it does have uses.

Me, when...

hjp (9/23/2014)

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In short: This type of coding ought to be avoided at all cost! - if you assign value to a scalar variable, make sure you have a uniquely defined...

In Oracle, a Truncate cannot be rolled back (or couldn't last time I coded anything in Oracle). I suspect this is the origin of the myth that the same applies...

I didn't know the answer, but there was only one combination of two answers possible, the two that are basically the same thing but worded differently. Any other combination was...

Presumably it's the standard Microsoft trick - there's a bug in the software, they can't be bothered to fix it, so they...