Author: Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand’s speaking my language:

I’ve written about UNPIVOT before – see Use SQL Server’s UNPIVOT operator to help normalize output and Use SQL Server’s UNPIVOT operator to dynamically normalize output. It’s a powerful language feature that lets you flip results sideways, sort of like the opposite of PIVOT. This is great if you have columns like Phone1 and Phone2 but want to collapse them into one column. One of the challenges is that if you have other columns you also want to collapse similarly, like Email1 and Email2, you need to add an additional UNPIVOT operator or use a different approach. Is there a way to do this in a less complicated way?

Click through for the answer. And a free Curated SQL protip: if you ever want linked here, write an article about a good use case for the APPLY operator. I’m a sucker for those.

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Chad Callihan finds the DDL for a view:

I recently faced a situation where I had to track down the definition of a particular SQL view for various databases. I didn’t want to click through each database in SSMS to gather the information. I thought I would write a query that I could use to save some clicks and gather what I needed for each database.

The first part of that task, querying for the view definition, may be a bit tricky. I would venture to guess it may not be in the first couple of places you would think to look. Let’s walk through how we can use a query to retrieve the definition of a view.

Just make sure that you have newline retention on or else your view definition is all going on one line.

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