Most efficient method for adding leading 0's to an int in sql

Question

I need to return two fields from a database concatenated as \'field1-field2\'. The second field is an int, but needs to be returned as a fixed length of 5 with leading 0\'s. T

Answer 1

If you can afford/want to have a function in your database you could use something like:

CREATE FUNCTION LEFTPAD
           (@SourceString VARCHAR(MAX),
            @FinalLength  INT,
            @PadChar      CHAR(1)) 
RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX)
AS
BEGIN
  RETURN
    (SELECT Replicate(@PadChar, @FinalLength - Len(@SourceString)) + @SourceString)
END