TSQL equivalent of an MS Access Crosstab query

Question

What's the equivalent of an MS-Access crosstab query in TSQL? And Is there a better way?

I have a data organised like this:

Fish
ID   Name
---- ---------
1    Jack
2    Trout
3    Bass
4    Cat

FishProperty
ID   FishID Property Value
---- ------ -------- -----
1    1      Length   10
2    1      Girth    6
3    1      Weight   4
4    2      Length   6
5    2      Weight   2
6    3      Girth    12

I have a number of users who need to do reporting on the data and (obviously) it would be easier for them if they could see it like this:

Fish
ID   Name      Length Girth Weight
---- --------- ------ ----- ------
1    Jack      10     6     4
2    Trout     6            2
3    Bass             12

My plan was to create a crosstab-like view that they could report on directly.

Answer 1

Are you looking for PIVOT?

Edit: You may have to get to the second page before you see the usage of the PIVOT syntax.

Edit 2: Another example.

Example:

SELECT SalesPerson, [Oranges] AS Oranges, [Pickles] AS Pickles
FROM
(SELECT SalesPerson, Product, SalesAmount
FROM ProductSales ) ps
PIVOT
(
SUM (SalesAmount)
FOR Product IN
( [Oranges], [Pickles])
) AS pvt

Edit 3 CodeSlave, take a look at this blog entry for some more information concerning dynamic pivot queries.

Answer 2

As an alternative for a PIVOT query, you could create a view like this:

create view dbo.myview
as
select 
    fish.ID
,   fish.Name
,   len.Value as Length
,   gir.Value as Girth
,   wei.Value as Weight
from fish
left join fishproperty len 
    on len.fishid = fish.id 
    and len.property = 'Length'
left join fishproperty gir 
    on gir.fishid = fish.id 
    and gir.property = 'Girth'
left join fishproperty wei 
    on wei.fishid = fish.id 
    and wei.property = 'Weight'

If you don't know the columns ahead of time, the only solution I can think of is to generate the query dynamically and use "exec sp_executesql" to run it. For example:

declare @query nvarchar(4000)
set @query = 'select ... from fish'
-- For each column
set @query = @query + ' left join fishproperty ' +
    propname + ' on ' + propname + '.fishid = fish.id ' +
    'and ' + propname + '.property = ''' + propname + ''' '
exec sp_executesql @query

Warning: dynamic queries can be a maintenance headache.

Answer 3

It's a duplicate of this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/801635/help-needed-with-dynamic-pivoting-in-sql2005 and yes, it's possible to do with dynamic sql, with some tricks you'll even be able to do a select over results returned or create a view for it, but if your table has more than 1000 records, I would not recommend this approach as performance would be poor at best.

Answer 4

You can also use the CASE statement but your reporting tool should be able to do this for you ( dynamically! ) with the matrix/pivot/crosstab template.