Learning by doing

I recently added a customer tagging feature to our billing system. Users needed to be able to see a list of associated tags in their reports, so I needed to be able to collect all tags for a customer into a single string. Below is a rough approximation of the table schema. I did some research, and ended up creating a user-defined function (UDF) that returns a TABLE variable. Inside the UFD, I used a table variable, a cursor (which I wanted to avoid) and ran a query with the COALESCE() function for each customer. I was able to use my UDF as if it were a temporary table in my reports. Otherwise, I would have had to duplicate this code for each report. Before accepting this solution, I tried various flavors of selecting, updating, etc. but I couldn't find a solution without using a cursor. The code below is an untested generic adaptation of my working solution. TABLE: Customers Customer_ID INTEGER, CustomerName VARCHAR(50) TABLE: Membership Member_ID INTEGER, ...