You really love to overcomplicate things.

Even worse, I can force the order of execution with derived tables. I materialize one of the joins, thus

((T1

INNER JOIN

T2

ON T1.a = T2.a)

AS X

T3

ON X.a...

That's the beauty of relational databases, you don't need to store the repeated values. You just need to use the joins wisely.

CREATE TABLE #Employees(

emp__id char(3),

...

Why would you do such a thing?

This would denormalize...

You might need to create a dynamic cross tab. I'm not sure if you will face problems with some limitations on columns or strings.

Read about them in here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Crosstab/65048/

You need to use dynamic code. But that will open the possibility of SQL injection.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188001.aspx

Until you find that Gordon Abraham and Abraham Gordon (or any other combination of names) are two...

I saw the single parent-child relationship...

You don't need UNION ALL. UNION will add rows and you need to add columns. To add columns, we use JOIN.

In this case, you need some kind of self join...

Using the CASE and OVER clauses instead of reading three times the same table. 😉

;WITH T AS (

SELECT 1111 CustID, 201201 MonthID, 10001 Amt UNION

SELECT 1111...

Close enough if you add nose, goatee and some...

You're assuming that all people think the same way.

People that think in sets, are very capable to understand commutativity so they can understand that a + b + c...

Maybe you're experiencing some kind of waits or blocking.

I'm afraid, "he-who-shall-not-be-named" is back in the forums.

I hope that I can behave well enough.

That will work to get a single value. If you need several values/groups, you could read about it in the following article:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/comma+separated+list/71700/

It's funny how Joe Celko can suggest that someone learns so many ISO standards and can't even learn an ANSI standard that has been out for 22 years. Please use...