I was having a discussion with someone the other day on the merits of using PIVOT / Cross-Tab functionality in SQL.
Back when the primary platform I used was Teradata, you didn’t have a PIVOT function, so if you wanted to do something similar to a Pivot, you had to build a series of CASE statements to build your fields up. This was fine, but you had to know beforehand what columns you wanted to have on your output
SQL SERVER (2005+) does provide a PIVOT option, but to be honest, it’s only marginally better than the CASE statement approach – you still have to know what column headings you want in your query.
So, if you want to pivot by the day of the week, that’s fine because there are a fixed number of days in the week and you can account for this.
But what if you want to have a field for each Agent/Region/date etc? You won’t always be able know what fields you’re going to need.Read More
One of my favourite features that has been added in recent years, are the Excel Tables. Excel Tables, really, are just a way of formatting your data to make it easier to work with and manage – but despite it having been around since Excel 2007, they don’t seem to have had a huge uptake,Read More
