Question

I have a column here which is a simple example of my problem

COLUMN1
1
2

How would I add the two numbers in COLUMN1

Answer 1

You’re still not very clear on what you’re trying to do – if you want to SUM up the numeric values from your table, you can use something like this:

SELECT
    SUM(CAST(Column1 AS INT))
FROM    
    dbo.YourTableNameHere
WHERE
    ISNUMERIC(Column1) = 1

This will just sum up all the numeric values over the whole table.

Concatenating together all the non-numeric values is a bit trickier – you’ll have to use something like this FOR XML PATH('') “trick” to get this done:

SELECT
    REPLACE(
        (SELECT '#' + Column1
         FROM dbo.YourTableNameName
         WHERE ISNUMERIC(Column1) = 0    
         FOR XML PATH('')), '#', '')