/tags/for-xml/ Recent content in FOR XML on Bitfern Hugo en-nz Sun, 05 Jan 2014 04:55:51 +0000 /blog/twelfth-day-of-christmas/ Sun, 05 Jan 2014 04:55:51 +0000 /blog/twelfth-day-of-christmas/ <p>A festive post for the <!-- raw HTML omitted -->twelfth day of Christmas<!-- raw HTML omitted --> and one way to avoid taking the decorations down for a while longer!</p> <p>If you have each gift from the “Twelve days of Christmas” song as an individual record in a SQL Server database table, can you write a query that returns one row for each verse of the song?</p> <p>Yes you can. This problem is similar to other cases where you need to flatten multiple rows into a single string. In this case for <em>each day</em> we want a comma separated list of the gifts for that day <em>and all preceding days</em>.</p>