How would you do give the user a preference for how from an SQL table is to be printed?

I'm given a task from a prospective employer which involves SQL tables. One requirement that they mentioned is that they want the name retrieved from a table called "Employees" to come in the form at of either "<LastName>, <FirstName>" OR "<FirstName> <MiddleName> <LastName> <Suffix>". This appears confusing to me because this kind of sounds like they're asking me to make a function or something. I could probably do this in a programming language and have the information retrieved that way, but to do this in the SQL table exclusively is weird to me. Since I'm rather new to SQL and my familiarity with SQL doesn't exceed simple tasks such as creating databases, tables, fields, inser开发者_StackOverflowting data into fields, updating fields in records, deleting records in tables which meet a specific condition, and selecting fields from tables.

I hope that this isn't considered cheating since I mentioned that this was for a prospective employer, but if I was still in school then I could just outright ask a professor where I can find a clue for this or he would've outright told me in class. But, for a prospective job, I'm not sure who I would ask about any confusion. Thanks in advance for anyone's help.

A SQL query has a fixed column output: you can't change it. To achieve this. you could have a concatenate with a CASE statement to make it one varchar column, but then you need something (parameter) to switch the CASE.

So, this is presentation, not querying SQL.

I'd return all 4 columns mentioned and decide how I want them in the client.

Unless you have just been asked for 2 different queries on the same SQL table

You haven't specified the RDBMS, but in SQL Server you could accomplish this using Computed Columns.

Typically, you would use a View over the table..