On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 at 17:09, Ron <ronljohnsonjr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > As much as I hate to say it, MSFT was right to ignore this bug in the standard. Standards are standards for a reason. It is almost never correct to deliberately ignore them. If you don't like them, then revise the standard. Historically Microsoft ignored standards either because they misunderstood them or because they wanted to lock in their customers, not for any reasons of altruism. For what it's worth, I can see a value to having SELECT 'this is quite a long string' 'which I've joined together ' 'across multiple lines'; although the advantage of it vs using a concat operator is slim. Geoff