Understanding PIVOT function in T-SQL

Question

I am very new to SQL.

I have a table like this:

ID | TeamID | UserID | ElementID | PhaseID | Effort
-------------------------------------------------         


        

Answer 1

Ive something to add here which no one mentioned.

The pivot function works great when the source has 3 columns: One for the aggregate, one to spread as columns with for, and one as a pivot for row distribution. In the product example it's QTY, CUST, PRODUCT.

However, if you have more columns in the source it will break the results into multiple rows instead of one row per pivot based on unique values per additional column (as Group By would do in a simple query).

See this example, ive added a timestamp column to the source table:

Now see its impact:

SELECT CUST, MILK

FROM Product
-- FROM (SELECT CUST, Product, QTY FROM PRODUCT) p
PIVOT (
    SUM(QTY) FOR PRODUCT IN (MILK)
) AS pvt

ORDER BY CUST

---

In order to fix this, you can either pull a subquery as a source as everyone has done above - with only 3 columns (this is not always going to work for your scenario, imagine if you need to put a where condition for the timestamp).

Second solution is to use a group by and do a sum of the pivoted column values again.

SELECT 
CUST, 
sum(MILK) t_MILK

FROM Product
PIVOT (
    SUM(QTY) FOR PRODUCT IN (MILK)
) AS pvt

GROUP BY CUST
ORDER BY CUST

GO