Question

I have a table formatted like the one below, i want to split it up so theres a column for month and year ie. January 2014 then another column for cost. So effectively each row would be split into 12 different rows, but i cant for the life of me figure out how to approach it. Any help would be greatly appreciated

    CREATE TABLE dbo.Line14(
    ItemID int IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
    Detail nvarchar(max) NULL,
    Type nvarchar(255) NULL,
    Cat nvarchar(255) NULL,
    Jan_14 money NULL,
    Feb_14 money NULL,
    Mar_14 money NULL,
    Apr_14 money NULL,
    May_14 money NULL,
    Jun_14 money NULL,
    Jul_14 money NULL,
    Aug_14 money NULL,
    Sep_14 money NULL,
    Oct_14 money NULL,
    Nov_14 money NULL,
    Dec_14 money NULL
) ON PRIMARY TEXTIMAGE_ON PRIMARY
GO 

Answer 1

You should be able to use the UNPIVOT function which converts the data from columns into rows:

select itemid,
  detail,
  type,
  cat,
  Month,
  2014 as Year,
  value
from Line14
unpivot
(
  value
  for Month in (Jan_14, Feb_14, Mar_14, Apr_14,
                May_14, Jun_14, Jul_14, Aug_14,
                Sep_14, Oct_14, Nov_14, Dec_14)
) unpiv

See SQL Fiddle with Demo.

The result would be similar to this:

| ITEMID | DETAIL | TYPE |  CAT |  MONTH | YEAR | VALUE |
---------------------------------------------------------
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Jan_14 | 2014 |    10 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Feb_14 | 2014 |    12 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Mar_14 | 2014 |    45 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Apr_14 | 2014 |    56 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | May_14 | 2014 |    89 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Jun_14 | 2014 |    78 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Jul_14 | 2014 |    96 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Aug_14 | 2014 |    35 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Sep_14 | 2014 |    55 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Oct_14 | 2014 |    30 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Nov_14 | 2014 |    99 |
|      1 |   Test |    C | blah | Dec_14 | 2014 |   120 |