Question

I am attempting to merge something like this in my SQL Server database:

[TicketID], [Person]
 T0001       Alice
 T0001       Bob
 T0002       Catherine
 T0002       Doug
 T0003       Elaine

Into this:

[TicketID], [People]
 T0001       Alice, Bob
 T0002       Catherine, Doug
 T0003       Elaine

I need to do this in both SQL Server and Oracle.

I have found the function GROUP_CONCAT for MySQL that does exactly what I need here, but MySQL is not an option here.

EDIT: Test bench:

DECLARE @Tickets TABLE (
    [TicketID] char(5) NOT NULL,
    [Person] nvarchar(15) NOT NULL
)

INSERT INTO @Tickets VALUES
    ('T0001', 'Alice'),
    ('T0001', 'Bob'),
    ('T0002', 'Catherine'),
    ('T0002', 'Doug'),
    ('T0003', 'Elaine')

SELECT * FROM @Tickets

Answer 1

Here is a solution that works in SQL Server 2005+:

SELECT t.TicketID,
       STUFF(ISNULL((SELECT ', ' + x.Person
                FROM @Tickets x
               WHERE x.TicketID = t.TicketID
            GROUP BY x.Person
             FOR XML PATH (''), TYPE).value('.','VARCHAR(max)'), ''), 1, 2, '') [No Preceeding Comma],
       ISNULL((SELECT ', ' + x.Person
                FROM @Tickets x
               WHERE x.TicketID = t.TicketID
            GROUP BY x.Person
             FOR XML PATH (''), TYPE).value('.','VARCHAR(max)'), '') [Preceeding Comma If Not Empty]
  FROM @Tickets t
GROUP BY t.TicketID

Reference:

• STUFF (Transact-SQL)