Question

I know this question could have passed a few times here but I haven’t really found a workaround whatsoever. Also could my question be a little different.

Situation is: I have a table with 130 columns (+100.000 rows), and the number of columns will even increase in the future. For this reason I would like to define the selection of the columns as [select all but one]

AS I want to duplicate a row with [select all] I get an error on the primary key -> the nc_ID because -of course- it tries to duplicated this value also instead of increasing it by one.

It is obvious that the column that I want to excluded from the selection is the first one, the nc_ID. I read and heard that this kind of [select all but one] solutions can only be accomplished with dynamic sql. If so could someone explain me via a piece if sql code?


INSERT into TableName (all columns except the first *nc_ID*)
Select * From TableName Where nc_ID=12345;

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Were you asking how to do this in dynamic SQL? – Something like the following should work.

(Obligatory link to The Curse and Blessings of Dynamic SQL)

DECLARE @TableName varchar(500)
DECLARE @nc_ID INT
SET @nc_ID = 12345
SET @TableName = '[dbo].[TableName]'

DECLARE @Dynsql nvarchar(max)

SELECT @Dynsql = ISNULL(@Dynsql + ',','') + QUOTENAME(name) FROM sys.columns
WHERE object_id = object_id(@TableName) and is_identity = 0 and is_computed = 0
ORDER BY column_id

IF @@ROWCOUNT=0
RAISERROR('%s not found in sys.columns',16,1, @TableName)

SET @Dynsql = 'INSERT INTO  ' + @TableName + '
           ('+ @Dynsql +')
SELECT '+ @Dynsql +'
  FROM ' + @TableName + '
WHERE  nc_ID = @nc_ID'

EXEC sp_executesql @Dynsql, N'@nc_ID int',@nc_ID=@nc_ID