SQL INITCAP

Capitalizes the first letter of each word, lowercasing the rest — the standard way to format a name for display, regardless of how it was originally entered.

What & Why

INITCAP(text) capitalizes the first letter of each word and lowercases the remaining letters. Here it turns internal campaign channel values such as google_ads and email into consistent report labels.

INITCAP changes only the query output. It does not replace a governed display-name mapping when underscores or abbreviations need custom wording.

See How It Works

BUSINESS QUESTION

Marketing wants campaign channels displayed as report labels.

id	name	channel	spend	start_date	end_date	status	target_segment
1	Spring Launch	google_ads	55000.00	2024-01-15	2024-03-31	active	smb
2	Retention Webinar	email	45000.00	2024-02-10	2024-04-15	active	enterprise
3	Finance Retargeting	linkedin	50000.00	2024-03-12	2024-05-31	active	enterprise
4	Enterprise Search	google_ads	60000.00	2024-04-01	2024-06-30	active	enterprise

EXAMPLE QUERY

SELECT
  id AS campaign_id,
  INITCAP(channel) AS channel_label
FROM marketing.campaigns
ORDER BY campaign_id;

RESULT — exact output from the displayed Queryflo rows

campaign_id	channel_label
1	Google_Ads
2	Email
3	Linkedin
4	Google_Ads

INITCAP transforms the stored campaign-channel strings without replacing them.

Now You Try

Practice this concept

Marketing wants campaign channels displayed as report labels.

Available schema

marketing

Prefix tables with marketing.table_name.

campaign_idchannel_label

marketing.campaigns

Column	Type
id	integer
name	text
channel	text
spend	numeric
start_date	date
end_date	date
status	text
target_segment	text
legacy_id	text

query.sql

Intermediate business practice