For a web application I'm working on, I need to concatenate many fields delimited by a delimiter into one large text field. So I lookuped up a way to do concatenation in SQL, and found out that there is no standard way to concatenate in SQL:

1. In MySQL, one uses the a concat() function which accepts multiple arguments.
2. In Oracle, concat() accepts only two arguments, and there's also the "||" infix operator which can be chained.
3. In MS SQL Server, one uses the "+" operator.
4. In SQLite also has the "||" operator.
5. PostgreSQL also has the || operator

In short, there's no portable way to do such an elementary operation. The "||" operator seems to be the most widely supported but it is not supported by MSSQL and MySQL. Thus, for the application I wrote I ended up doing the concatenation in Perl.

('ANSI ' || 'SQL' || ' Standard')-- (Assuming it will work in your SQL implementation).