Question

I have lately learned what is dynamic sql and one of the most interesting features of it to me is that we can use dynamic columns names and tables. But I cannot think about useful real life examples. The only one that came into my mind is statistical table.

Let`s say that we have table with name, type and created_data. Then we want to have a table that in columns are years from created_data column and in row type and number of names created in years. (sorry for my English)

What can be other useful real life examples of using dynamic sql with column and table as parameters? How do you use it?

Thanks for any suggestions and help 🙂
regards
Gabe

/edit
Thx for replies, I am particulary interested in examples that do not contain administrative things or database convertion or something like that, I am looking for examples where the code in example java is more complicated than using a dynamic sql in for example stored procedure.

Answer 1

I once had to write an Excel import where the excel sheet was not like a csv file but layed out like a matrix. So I had to deal with a unknown number of columns for 3 temporary tables (columns, rows, “infield”). The rows were also a short form of tree. Sounds weird, but was a fun to do.
In SQL Server there was no chance to handle this without dynamic SQL.