Concat
Also known as
concatenate
What is concat?
Concat (or concatenate) is a function that combines multiple strings into a single string. The word comes from the Latin root con- for “together”, and caten- for “chain”. For example, you might want to concatenate a city (Vienna) with a country (Austria) to get a single location string like “Vienna, Austria”.
The Metabase concat expression is translated into a SQL CONCAT function when running against your database, like this:
SELECT CONCAT(City, ", ", Country) AS "Location"
In Metabase and other BI tools, you can assume that concat only works with the text data type (often called a string). If you want to use concat with other data types, like numbers or dates, you’ll have to convert them to text first.
If you prefer to write SQL, note that the functions JOIN, UNION, and MERGE might sound like they work similarly to CONCAT, but they are used to combine rows and columns from different tables, rather than text strings from different columns.
