Question

How do you add a string to a column in SQL Server?

UPDATE [myTable] SET [myText]=' '+[myText]

That doesn’t work:

The data types varchar and text are incompatible in the add operator.

You would use concat on MySQL, but how do you do it on SQL Server?

Answer 1

like said before best would be to set datatype of the column to nvarchar(max), but if that’s not possible you can do the following using cast or convert:

-- create a test table 
create table test (
    a text
) 
-- insert test value
insert into test (a) values ('this is a text')
-- the following does not work !!!
update test set a = a + ' and a new text added'
-- but this way it works: 
update test set a = cast ( a as nvarchar(max))  + cast (' and a new text added' as nvarchar(max) )
-- test result
select * from test
-- column a contains:
this is a text and a new text added