Snowflake CONCAT: How to Concatenate Strings

What it does

CONCAT joins together two or more text strings into one. It's like when you tie together pieces of string; each piece is added to the end of the other. You can use this to combine words, sentences, or parts of text to form a new string.

Note on null values: If any of the strings you want to combine is null (which means there's nothing there), then the entire result will also be null. Think of it like a chain: if one link is missing, the whole chain breaks.

Common use cases

Creating a Full Name: Combine a first name and a last name into a full name.
Generating an Email Address: Use parts of a person's name to create an email address.
Address Formatting: Join street, city, and country into a full address.

How to use it

You can simply list the strings you want to join, separated by commas:


_10SELECT CONCAT('Hello, ', 'world!') AS greeting;

This would give you: Hello, world!

Alternative using || operator

You can also use the || operator to concatenate strings, which works similarly but looks a bit different:


_10SELECT 'Hello, ' || 'world!' AS greeting;

This does the same thing, combining the pieces into Hello, world!

Using CONCAT is handy when you want to piece together text in a database, whether it's for creating messages, formatting data, or building identifiers from parts.

Examples

Concatenating two columns

This example combines the first_name and last_name columns to form a full name.

Input

Table: hitchhikers_characters

id	first_name	last_name	title
1	Arthur	Dent	Mr.
2	Ford	Prefect	Mr.
3	Zaphod	Beeblebrox	President

Snowflake SQL Query


_10SELECT
_10    id,
_10    first_name,
_10    last_name,
_10    title,
_10    CONCAT (first_name, ' ', last_name) AS full_name
_10FROM
_10    hitchhikers_characters;

Output

id	first_name	last_name	title	full_name
1	Arthur	Dent	Mr.	Arthur Dent
2	Ford	Prefect	Mr.	Ford Prefect
3	Zaphod	Beeblebrox	President	Zaphod Beeblebrox

Concatenating three columns

This example will concatenate the title, first_name, and last_name to create a more formal identification for each character.

Input

Table: hitchhikers_characters

id	first_name	last_name	title
1	Arthur	Dent	Mr.
2	Ford	Prefect	Mr.
3	Zaphod	Beeblebrox	President

Snowflake SQL Query


_10SELECT
_10    id,
_10    first_name,
_10    last_name,
_10    title,
_10    CONCAT (title, ' ', first_name, ' ', last_name) AS formal_name
_10FROM
_10    hitchhikers_characters;

Output

id	first_name	last_name	title	formal_name
1	Arthur	Dent	Mr.	Mr. Arthur Dent
2	Ford	Prefect	Mr.	Mr. Ford Prefect
3	Zaphod	Beeblebrox	President	President Zaphod Beeblebrox

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