Question

I’m having trouble converting a MS Access pivot table over to SQL Server. Was hoping someone might help..

TRANSFORM First(contacts.value) AS FirstOfvalue
SELECT contacts.contactid
FROM contacts RIGHT JOIN contactrecord ON contacts.[detailid] = contactrecord.[detailid]
GROUP BY contacts.contactid
PIVOT contactrecord.wellknownname
;

Edit: Responding to some of the comments

Contacts table has three fields

contactid | detailid | value  |
1             1          Scott

contactrecord has something like

detailid  | wellknownname
1         |  FirstName
2         |  Address1 
3         |  foobar

contractrecord is dyanamic in that the user at anytime can create a field to be added to contacts

the access query pulls out

contactid  | FirstName | Address1 | foobar
1          | Scott     |   null   |  null

which is the pivot on the wellknownname. The key here is that the number of columns is dynamic since the user can, at anytime, create another field for the contact. Being new to pivot tables altogether, I’m wondering how I can recreate this access query in sql server.

As for transform… that’s a built in access function. More information is found about it here. First() will just take the first result on that matching row.

I hope this helps and appreciate all the help.

Answer 1

I quick search for dynamic pivot tables comes up with this article.

After renaming things in his last query on the page I came up with this:

DECLARE @PivotColumnHeaders VARCHAR(max);
SELECT @PivotColumnHeaders = COALESCE(@PivotColumnHeaders + ',['+ CAST(wellknownname as varchar) + ']','['+ CAST(wellknownname as varchar) + ']')
FROM contactrecord;

DECLARE @PivotTableSQL NVARCHAR(max);

SET @PivotTableSQL = N'
    SELECT *
    FROM (
        SELECT 
            c.contactid,
            cr.wellknownname,
            c.value
        FROM contacts c
        RIGHT JOIN contactrecord cr
        on c.detailid = cr.detailid
    ) as pivotData
    pivot(
        min(value)
        for wellknownname in (' + @PivotColumnHeaders +')
    ) as pivotTable
'
;

execute(@PivotTableSQL);

which despite its ugliness, it does the job