SQL Server: collect values in an aggregation temporarily and reuse in the same query

Posted by Erwin Brandstetter on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Erwin Brandstetter
Published on 2011-11-13T03:52:21Z Indexed on 2011/11/13 9:50 UTC
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How do I accumulate values in t-SQL? AFAIK there is no ARRAY type.
I want to reuse the values like demonstrated in this PostgreSQL example using array_agg().

SELECT a[1] || a[i] AS foo
      ,a[2] || a[5] AS bar  -- assuming we have >= 5 rows for simplicity
FROM   (
    SELECT array_agg(text_col ORDER BY text_col) AS a
         ,count(*)::int4 AS i
    FROM   tbl
    WHERE  id between 10 AND 100
    ) x

How would I best solve this with t-SQL?
Best I could come up with are two CTE and subselects:

;WITH x AS (
  SELECT row_number() OVER (ORDER BY name) AS rn
        ,name AS a
  FROM   #t
  WHERE  id between 10 AND 100
  ), i AS (
  SELECT count(*) AS i
  FROM   x
  )
SELECT (SELECT a FROM x WHERE rn = 1) + (SELECT a FROM x WHERE rn = i) AS foo
      ,(SELECT a FROM x WHERE rn = 2) + (SELECT a FROM x WHERE rn = 5) AS bar
FROM   i

Test setup:

CREATE TABLE #t(
 id INT PRIMARY KEY
,name NVARCHAR(100))

INSERT INTO #t VALUES
 (3 , 'John')
,(5 , 'Mary')
,(8 , 'Michael')
,(13, 'Steve')
,(21, 'Jack')
,(34, 'Pete')
,(57, 'Ami')
,(88, 'Bob')

Is there a simpler way?

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