Comments on: SQL Version of YesNoFormat

By: Anuj Gakhar

Anuj Gakhar — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:40:29 +0000

@Marek, I dont think IF is a Sql server function. Looks like a Mysql function to me.

By: Marek

Marek — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:13:36 +0000

Try this:
SELECT IF(columnName, ‘Yes’, ‘No’) as YesNo FROM TableName

By: Çağlar Gülçehre

Çağlar Gülçehre — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:23:45 +0000

Wow this is a very clever trick.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:31:49 +0000

For oracle:

select decode(YesNoCol, 1, ‘Yes’, ‘No’) from TableName;

By: Anuj Gakhar

Anuj Gakhar — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:20:04 +0000

Well spotted Boyan. Thanks. I have updated it now.

By: Boyan Kostadinov

Boyan Kostadinov — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:11:55 +0000

Neat trick. I know you probably meant to say SUBSTRING(’YesNo’, 1, 3) returns YES but you said returns ‘NO’.

By: Ron Stewart

Ron Stewart — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:57:16 +0000

I’d use the CASE statement (and have for exactly this) because it would be much clearer to the next developer that comes along (which may well be me) and has to figure out what that clause within the query is doing…

By: Dan G. Switzer, II

Dan G. Switzer, II — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:46:50 +0000

I would think using a CASE statement would be much more efficient.

By: Anuj Gakhar

Anuj Gakhar — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:24:12 +0000

@Fro, yes, that’s another way of doing it. I didnt think that String parsing was a time consuming thing in SQL. But I am not a SQL expert, so not really my domain.

Thanks for the note though.

By: Fro

Fro — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:16:55 +0000

That’s an interesting approach Anuj. Personally, I would use a CASE solution.

CASE columnname WHEN 1 THEN ‘Yes’ ELSE ‘No’ END AS ‘YesNo’

The primary reason I prefer this over your SUBSTRING method is that SQL Server doesn’t have to do any string parsing.

You probably won’t notice much of a difference with basic queries, but it could add up if you’re doing some heavy lifting.