Question

I have a table in a database with rows as follows:

Milk
Eggs
Butter
Cheese
Bread

I want to pivot the entire row into a column appears as follows:

Milk Eggs Butter Cheese Bread

I have found a lot of examples using it with multiple columns and rows or based on select conditions. I haven’t found any examples of how to just do one row, and I can’t figure it out. Thanks for the help!

Edit:
The ways below work great but is there a way to do it and turn the row value into a column value?

Answer 1

Using a modified version of the sample here.

DECLARE
    @SQL varchar(MAX),
    @ColumnList varchar(MAX)

SELECT @ColumnList=
       COALESCE(@ColumnList + ',','') + QUOTENAME(your_column_name)
FROM
(
       SELECT DISTINCT your_column_name
       FROM your_table 
) T


SET @SQL = '
WITH PivotData AS
(
       SELECT your_column_name
       FROM your_table
)
SELECT
    ' + @ColumnList + '
FROM
    PivotData
PIVOT
(
    MAX(your_column_name)
    FOR your_column_name
    IN (' + @ColumnList + ')
) AS PivotResult'

EXEC (@SQL)

P.S. I’d have to seriously question why I was doing this. 🙂