simple(?) PIVOT without an aggregate

Question

Pivots, man...I\'m just missing it. Maybe it\'s because I\'m not doing an aggregate. Heck, maybe a pivot isn\'t the way to do this. It feels like it should be simple, but it\'s

Answer 1

If you're only ever going to have 2 values, you could do it like this

select
    (select top(1) col1 from tbl1 order by col1) fauxfield1,
    (select top(1) col1 from tbl1 order by col1 desc) fauxfield2;

What I don't understand however is why there is a need to avoid aggregates? Have you found some crippled version of SQL Server? The normal query would be

select min(col1) fauxfield1, max(col1) fauxfield2
  from tbl1;