SQL Tip: Create comma seperated string from values in a column (& COALESCE)

This was originally created in 2011/2012 in a series I dubbed "SQL Tips" for my team (via email and an internal blog site). I've decided to add these SQL Tips to my external blog. These are being posted exactly how they were written ~6 years ago...unless I found someone's name being called out...I may have edited that to protect the innocent. Note: there are different ways to achieve this, at the time of writing this tip I didn't want to show all the ways but rather show one way.

Not a very catchy title I know, but hopefully something useful nonetheless. There are times when I need to create one record from a query that returns multiple records in a column. This is actually quite simple to do but will require the use of a variable and the built-in function COALESCE.

The COALESCE function:

This function will return the first non-NULL value in the list of items given. It’s kind of like the ISNULL function on crack. Unlike the ISNULL function you can pass it many columns or values and it will look for the first item that IS NOT NULL and return that. If all values or columns are NULL then it will return NULL.

Test Coalesce query:

DECLARE  @CoalesceTest1 varchar(10) = NULL

        ,@CoalesceTest2 varchar(10) = 'blah'

SELECT  COALESCE(NULL, NULL, NULL, @CoalesceTest1) AS [Test1]

       ,COALESCE(NULL, NULL, NULL, @CoalesceTest2) AS [Test2];

The output:

Creating the one record value:

Now that we understand the COALESCE function, let's see how to create our one record value. The basic structure f the query is:

DECLARE @List nvarchar(max);

SELECT @List = COALESCE(@List + N'[What you want to separate the values with]', N'') + [Column Name]

  FROM [table name]

SELECT @List;

Thus, if I wanted to create a comma separated list of all the column names in a particular table or view (I have and do use this when writing some of my scripts actually) I would use something like:

DECLARE @Columns nvarchar(max);

SELECT  @Columns = COALESCE(@Columns + N', ', N'') + name

  FROM sys.all_columns

 WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N'SysResList')

 ORDER BY column_id;

SELECT @Columns;

The result: "SysResList_PK, NALPath, SiteCode, RoleName, ResourceType, ServerName, ServerRemoteName, PublicDNSName, InternetEnabled, Shared, Certificate, SslState, ForestFQDN, DomainFQDN, IISPreferredPort, IISSslPreferredPort, IsAvailable, CertThumbprint, Flags"

If I want to have the column names (or whatever value) surrounded with single quotes or brackets or anything at all I could add that quite easily:

DECLARE @Columns nvarchar(max);

SELECT  @Columns = COALESCE(@Columns + N', ', N'') + N'['+name+N']'

  FROM sys.all_columns

 WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N'SysResList')

 ORDER BY column_id;

SELECT @Columns;

The result: "[SysResList_PK], [NALPath], [SiteCode], [RoleName], [ResourceType], [ServerName], [ServerRemoteName], [PublicDNSName], [InternetEnabled], [Shared], [Certificate], [SslState], [ForestFQDN], [DomainFQDN], [IISPreferredPort], [IISSslPreferredPort], [IsAvailable], [CertThumbprint], [Flags]"

Can you find a good (or interesting) use for this tip? Please share with the rest of us if you do!