Question

I need to clone table rows but am struggling with this syntax. My train of thought went like this:

DECLARE @myPk Uniqueidentifier
SET @myPK = NewID()

INSERT INTO my.table (pk, fullname, two, three)
SELECT (@myPK, "Clone of " + fullname , two, three) FROM my.table where pk= @pk

but of course the syntax is incorrect. I’ve also tried

INSERT INTO my.table (pk, fullname, two, three)
SELECT (@myPK = newId(), "Clone of " + fullname , two, three) FROM my.table where pk= @pk    

(I hope you can see where I’m trying to go :-/)

Short of declaring variables for each table column (not practical due to high number of columns) or using #tempTables (not permitted in this code shop) is there a neat syntax for doing this?

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

Don’t enclose your SELECTed fields in parentheses.

Try:

INSERT INTO my.table (pk, fullname, two, three)
SELECT @myPK, 
       "Clone of " + fullname , 
       two, 
       three 
FROM my.table
where pk= @pk

When you enclose everything in parentheses in a SELECT statement the engine tries to make that one value, which is not possible.

For instance, try SELECT (1,2,3) which will throw a syntax error also, while SELECT 1,2,3 works fine.