How do I perform a GROUP BY on an aliased column in MS-SQL Server?

Question

I\'m trying to perform a group by action on an aliased column (example below) but can\'t determine the proper syntax.

SELECT       LastName + \', \'         


        

Answer 1

If you want to avoid the mess of the case statement being in your query twice, you may want to place it in a User-Defined-Function.

Sorry, but SQL Server would not render the dataset before the Group By clause so the column alias is not available. You could use it in the Order By.