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Question

I'm looking for an efficient way to convert rows to columns in SQL server, I heard that PIVOT is not very fast, and I need to deal with lot of records.

This is my example:

   -------------------------------
   | Id | Value  | ColumnName    |
   -------------------------------
   | 1  | John   | FirstName     |
   | 2  | 2.4    | Amount        |
   | 3  | ZH1E4A | PostalCode    |
   | 4  | Fork   | LastName      |
   | 5  | 857685 | AccountNumber |
   -------------------------------

This is my result:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
| FirstName  |Amount|   PostalCode   |   LastName  |  AccountNumber |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| John       | 2.4  |   ZH1E4A       |   Fork      |  857685        |
---------------------------------------------------------------------

How can I build the result?

Accepted Answer

There are several ways that you can transform data from multiple rows into columns.

Using `PIVOT`

In SQL Server you can use the PIVOT function to transform the data from rows to columns:

select Firstname, Amount, PostalCode, LastName, AccountNumber
from
(
  select value, columnname
  from yourtable
) d
pivot
(
  max(value)
  for columnname in (Firstname, Amount, PostalCode, LastName, AccountNumber)
) piv;

See Demo.

Pivot with unknown number of `columnnames`

If you have an unknown number of columnnames that you want to transpose, then you can use dynamic SQL:

DECLARE @cols AS NVARCHAR(MAX),
    @query  AS NVARCHAR(MAX)

select @cols = STUFF((SELECT ',' + QUOTENAME(ColumnName) 
                    from yourtable
                    group by ColumnName, id
                    order by id
            FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE
            ).value('.', 'NVARCHAR(MAX)') 
        ,1,1,'')

set @query = N'SELECT ' + @cols + N' from 
             (
                select value, ColumnName
                from yourtable
            ) x
            pivot 
            (
                max(value)
                for ColumnName in (' + @cols + N')
            ) p '

exec sp_executesql @query;

See Demo.