Posted by --CELKO-- on 10/31/07 17:57
There are a lot of good reasons so many experienced SQL programmers
are warning you about this.
Why do you wish to destroy First Normal Form (1NF) with a concatenated
list structure? Normal forms are the foundation of RDBMS, after
all.
Why are you formatting data in the back end? The basic principle of a
tiered architecture is that display is done in the front end and never
in the back end. This is a more basic programming principle than just
SQL and RDBMS.
Get a reporting tool so you can do a sort for your lists and lay them
out on paper or a screen in a way that a human being can read them.
The kludges that have been posted are unpredictable, unsupported and
some are highly proprietary.
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