>Naomi, the problem with quoting Celko is that, unless you've read most of his volumes, he makes statements that some might view as contradictory.
>
>For example, in one of his puzzles books, he demonstrates how to produce a result set for an aging receivables report. The result set mimics the display of a raw aging report - this would contradict the post that you referenced, where he says "You apparently do not know that display is never, never, never done in the database. The whole basis of a tiered architecture is that display is done in the front end.". He has published code in his own books that indicates otherwise.
>
>The majority of the time, I agree with his post, that display should be done in the report writer. Bottom line, the PIVOT statement sucks and sucks royally - you need to use dynamic SQL to do anything meaningful with it. SSRS' built-in matrix/tablix control is far better than using PIVOT....however, once in a blue moon, a developer might need to generate a result set for a third party or some other feed, where the result set output must mimic a display, and no report writer is used. This is an occasional fact of life - one where experience across a number of different application requirements comes in.

Yes, no disagreement here.