PIVOT TABLE ~ SQL SERVER

What is a Pivot Table ?

A pivot table is a frequently used method of summarizing and displaying especially report data by means of grouping and aggregating values. Pivot tables are easily created by office users using Microsoft Excel or MS Access.
Since pivot table enables report builders and BI (Business Intelligence) specialists empower their presentation of reports and increase the visibility and unserstandability of mined data, pivot tables are common and preferred widely. Pivot tables display data in tabular form. The pivot table formatting is not different than a tabular report formatting.

But the table columns are formed by the report data itself. I mean as a pivot table example, your report creator can build a report with years and months in the left side of the table, the main product lines are displayed as columns, and total sales of each product line in the related year and month is displayed in the cell content.

Actually you can easily answer what is pivot table question, if you have build OLAP reports or if you are familiar with OLAP reporting. Pivot Table in sql grants the ability to display data in custom aggregations just like OLAP reports in SQL Server. Simply pivot tables can be thought of transforming a table with its data into another table format. Just as building a sales report in months and product lines from Sales Orders table.