Aliasing columns in a SELECT statement example

Overview

The purpose of aliasing a column is to have a friendly name for the column.  This name might differ from the physical design to business terms, or remove issues such as spacing in the column name.  Let’s take a look at an example.

Explanation

Let’s use the same query from an earlier tutorial with one minor modification for the column alias.  In the example below, we are selecting the LoginID column from the HumanResources.Employee table where the VacationHours column equals 8, and we are ordering the data by the HireDate in ascending order which is implied.  What is different is that we are aliasing the LoginID column as ‘Domain\LoginName’ to be a little bit more specific.

USE AdventureWorks;
GO
SELECT LoginID AS 'Domain\LoginName'
FROM HumanResources.Employee
WHERE VacationHours = 8
ORDER BY HireDate;
GO

Below is the sample result set, which shows the column name returned as ‘Domain\LoginName’ (alias) rather than LoginID (physical design):

Jeremy Kadlec

Jeremy Kadlec is a Founder, Editor and Author at MSSQLTips.com with more than 300 contributions and 25+ years of SQL Server experience. Jeremy leads a team of more than 300 authors helping millions of SQL Server professionals around the globe every second of the day for the last 20 years.  He is also the CTO @ Edgewood Solutions and a six-time SQL Server MVP based on his community contributions. Jeremy brings 25+ years of SQL Server DBA and Developer knowledge to the community and holds a bachelor’s degree from SSU and master’s degree from UMBC.