Question

I’m basically looking to do something like this:

SELECT MYCOLUMN AS 'MYALIAS' VARCHAR(500) 
FROM MYTABLE

What I’m doing is this:

SELECT COLUMN1 AS 'TEXT',
COLUMN 2 AS 'VALUE'
FROM MYTABLE

COLUMN2 is an INT column, however I need to append a string value with UNION as an “Other” selection. Is there a way to return that column as VARCHAR instead without actually building the table beforehand and using INSERT INTO with a CONVERT()? If not, no big deal, I was just looking to see if there was a slick way of doing it.

Answer 1

You can always cast the column to another type:

SELECT 
    COLUMN1,
    CAST(COLUMN2 AS VARCHAR(500))
FROM MYTABLE

The approach you have (AS 'TEXT') only defines an alias – a different name – for the columns – it does not influence the data type in any way.