When you are
dealing with character (string) data types in SQL Server, you can concatenate
multiple strings together with the plus operator. For example, you can write
'hi' + ' there' to get 'hi there'.
Be warned
that when you do concatenate strings using this operator, if any pieces are
NULL, the resulting string will be NULL. You can get around this by using the
CONCAT function instead. It will treat NULLs as empty strings.
There are a
lot of built in functions that work with strings. The SUBSTRING function will
give you a part of a string. CHARINDEX will tell you where a certain substring
is located in a bigger string. LEN will tell you how long a string is.
DATALENGTH tells you how many bytes are used to store the string.
REPLACE will change every occurrence of a
specified substring to another. REPLICATE will duplicate a substring a certain
specified number of times. UPPER and LOWER will change the case of a string.
And LTRIM and RTRIM will get rid of white space in the front and end of a
string respectively.
