formatting sql column as currency

<  I would like to return a price column as currency $10.50 format. How can I do it in my select statement:

select itemnmbr, price from item

answer

select itemnmbr, cast(price as decimal(10,2)) price from item

< would this be faster than doing it in the html using string.format("c", price) after returning the price as such from the sql table
It should be

It depends on the server cpu and browser/client  rendering speed

>> would this be faster than doing it in the html using string.format("c", price) after returning the price as such from the sql table

In this case, using sql query will be faster than by doing it at html side.

>> I would like to return a price column as currency $10.50 format. How can I do it in my select statement

As acperkins stated, you need to concate the currency symbol with your currency value.
SELECT '$' + CONVERT(varchar(20), @YourColumnName)

>>In this case, using sql query will be faster than by doing it at html side.<<
How can you possibly know this without knowing their code in the front-end?

T-SQL is notoriously slow when doing any type of string manipulation, combine that with the added network traffic generated and I cannot see how that can be true.

But quite aside from the nanosecond you may or may not save, this is a very bad idea and is best relegated to the Presentation layer.