Posted by Damien on 06/01/06 07:14

--CELKO-- wrote:
> >> I see you use CTE, why don't you pull the results down into the application, CTE's are a form of formatting for display purposes, as is COALESCE on the SELECT clause, as is ORDER BY etc... Just where do you draw the line? <<
>
> UNH? CTEs are virtual tables and have nothing to do with display. Do
> ypou also think that VIEWs and derived tables are formatting for user
> display? COALESCE is a function that works with NULLs and CAST() to
> get another internal data type result.
>
> Things like CONVERT() on dates or PRINT in T-SQL is formatting.

Hi Joe,

I didn't understand Tony's point about CTEs, but I think his point
about COALESCE stands. Surely, COALESCE is shorthand for having
formatting code at the front end like:

If Column1 is not null then
show Column1
Else if column2 is not null then
show Column2
Else if column3 is not null then
:
:
:
Else
show ColumnN
End If

Damien

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