Tim Van Wassenhove

Passionate geek, interested in Technology. Proud father of two

01 Aug 2011

Specialized solution for aggregate string concatenation

I have noticed that most people come up with the following solution to build a string in T-SQL:

WITH [Numbers] AS (	  
	SELECT TOP(10) [n]	  
	FROM [Nums] 
)	  
SELECT @message = COALESCE(@message, '') + '' + CAST([n] AS nvarchar(2))	  
FROM [Numbers];

SELECT @message = STUFF(@message, 1, 2, '');
SELECT @message;

Important! Microsoft has no official documentation describing this aggregate concatenation technique that is based on the assignment SELECT syntax. The behavior described here is based on observation alone. The current implementation of the ConcatOrders function doesn’t incorporate an ORDER BY clause and does not guarantee the order of concatenation. According to a blog entry by Microsoft’s Conor Cunningham, it seems that SQL Server will respect an ORDER BY clause if specified (http://blogs.msdn.com/sqltips/archive/2005/07/20/441053.aspx). Conor is a very credible source, but I should stress that besides this blog entry I haven’t found any official documentation describing how a multi-row assignment SELECT should behave—with or without an ORDER BY clause.

With the aid of FOR XML PATH (as mentionned in Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming we can solve this problem using a documented approach:

WITH [Numbers] AS (	  
	SELECT TOP(10) [n]	  
	FROM [Nums] 
)	  
SELECT @message = (SELECT '' + CAST([n] AS nvarchar(2)) AS [text()]  
FROM [Numbers]	  
FOR XML PATH(''));

SELECT @message = STUFF(@message, 1, 2, '');
SELECT @message;