Dan Blank shows how to use the PIVOT operator in SQL Server:
I was recently approached by my firms Marketing Manager with a request for some information. She wanted to know “Which departments have our top clients never done any work for?”. For some clarity, I work in a law firm with 11 departments. The request seems pretty straightforward at first. Then once I got thinking about how the output of this report would be presented it made me reconsider quite how simple a request this was. She handed me a drawing with her vision for the output. What she wanted was :
Client’s names down the left,
List of Departments across the top,
Ticks and crosses at the intersection to show whether they had or had not done work for them.
You can make a good argument that presentation mechanics like this are meant for a different tool (a presentation layer) but it’s useful to know how to pivot and unpivot data within T-SQL for more reasons than just presentation.