Inside Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008: T-SQL Querying

Pivoting

Pivoting is a technique that allows you to rotate rows to columns, possibly performing aggregations along the way. The number of applications for pivoting is simply astounding. In this section, I’ll present a few, including pivoting attributes in an open schema environment, solving relational division problems, and formatting aggregated data. Later in the chapter and also in later chapters in the book, I’ll show additional applications.

Pivoting Attributes

I’ll use open schema as the scenario for pivoting attributes. Open schema is a design problem describing an environment that needs to deal with frequent schema changes. The relational model and SQL were conceived to handle frequent changes and requests for data via SQL’s data manipulation ...