Let's start off with concatenation, or the joining of two or more strings. Remember, "string" is another name for "text value".

First, we'll need a new operator, +. This plus sign is the concatenation operator. If you write the following:

SELECT
  FirstName + LastName AS Name
FROM Copywriter;

The result for FirstName = N'Kate' and LastName = N'Gordon' will be N'KateGordon'. Notice that the result is a single string.

Quite simple, right? Of course, we probably want the first and the last name separated with a space. Here is how you do that:

SELECT
  FirstName + N' ' + LastName AS Name
FROM Copywriter;

Note that you use single quotes for constant text values (in our example, the constant value is a space, ' ') plus the letter N to indicate that it has UNICODE encoding. You don't use quotes for column names (FirstName, LastName). The + operator can be used many times in a single query.