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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T07:28:49+00:00

Suppose I have the following table: Row_ID String1 String2 Int1 Int2 1 ‘James’ ‘Jiao’

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Suppose I have the following table:

Row_ID String1 String2    Int1 Int2
1      'James' 'Jiao'     1    2
2      'Jack'  'Ripper'   1    3

I want it to look like this:

Row_ID String     Int
1      'James'    1
1      'Jiao'     2
2      'Jack'     1
2      'Ripper'   3

Note that the Int1/Int2 are never the same. They are unique from each other.

Not sure how to go about this really. Got everything else ready to go, but got stuck on this. I suspect some sort of reverse-pivotting would work? The String column is not finite set, neither is the Int column, so unpivot doesn’t seem to work here.

I am trying to avoid using a cursor to go through each row, selecting it into two rows, insert them into a temp table and so on and so forth. This approach will surely work, but is there a better, set-based approach?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Make two temporary tables or selects — one selects RowID, String1 and Int1, and the other selects RowID, String2 and Int2. Then alias or label the String columns to just String, and the Int columns to just Int. Then UNION ALL the two of those together to get your result.

    But I’m not familiar with T-SQL, this is just an answer from the realm of SQL in general.

    I did notice that you don’t want to use temporary tables, but if you just make two selects UNIONed together, doesn’t your db work out a much faster way to get the job done that doesn’t actually involve a row-by-row cursor?

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