Kikkoman

I have had occasion recently to focus on my deep and abiding dislike of SQL and (databases in general), and have determined that there is actually one thing SQL could do that would “make it all better”.

That would be: give me nice, easy, standard way of generating a pivot table / query where I don’t need to know all the columns I want back ahead of time.

Please, for the love of … whatever … make it so.    We all know the database can do it and do it reasonably efficiently, cause we’ve all spent days fiddling with frustratingly obtuse queries to trick it into doing it.

Hence you can imagine my surprise to find out that Access already has this all figured out.  Behold, Access’s TRANSFORM statement. Which pretty much does exactly what you want.

The kicker is that, it has been around and in use for a long time.

Can you imagine the billions of dollars wasted around the world writing stupid pivot table queries in SQL when companies have upgraded from Acess to a “real database”?  OMG.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 11:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.