The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL

10 Arrays

Init, Use, Destroy. Three procedure calls, six possible sequences, five of them wrong. I am quietly impressed that any nontrivial applications ever work.—Thomas L. Holaday

Because there’s no built-in array data type, there’s really no direct way to store or work with true arrays in Transact-SQL. There are a couple of alternatives that are fairly array-like, but since they really aren’t arrays in the 3GL sense of the word, they’re less than ideal.

The two most obvious ways to simulate an array in Transact-SQL are setting up a table that mimics an array (with columns simulating dimensions) and using a single column to store multiple values (with special indexing routines to flatten or compose the array elements). The first approach ...