Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

CONCAT

The new CONCAT function provides an alternative mechanism for concatenating string values into a single string. The CONCAT function takes a variable number of arguments. At least two input values are required, or an error is raised. Unlike the current method of concatenation using the + operator, CONCAT implicitly converts all arguments to strings. For example, if you pass an integer value to CONCAT, it casts it to a string before concatenating it into the result. If you use the + operator to concatenate a numeric value into a string, you have to first explicitly cast it to a character data type, or a data type conversion error is raised. The following example demonstrates the difference:

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SELECT 'ShiftID = ...