Question

When writing an INSERT statement with a lot of columns, it would be nice to have the value next to the column name like in an UPDATE statement. Something like:

insert into myTable
set
  [col1] = 'xxx',
  [col2] = 'yyy',
  [col3] = 42
  etc...

Are there any tricks to mimic this?

I thought I was onto something with this:

insert into myTable
select
  [col1] = 'xxx',
  [col2] = 'yyy',
  [col3] = 42
  etc...

But the aliases aren’t actually being associated with the insert table’s columns and if someone added a new column to the table it could really screw things up. Anyone have any other ideas of how one could do this?

Answer 1

The closest you’ll get would be to specify the columns on the insert (this will protect you from your concern about a new column being added) and alias the values on the select (which gives you some degree of self-documenting code).

insert into myTable
    ([col1], [col2], [col3])
    select 'xxx' as [col1], 'yyy' as [col2], 42 as [col3]