How to format a numeric column as phone number in SQL

This should do it:

UPDATE TheTable
SET PhoneNumber = SUBSTRING(PhoneNumber, 1, 3) + '-' + 
                  SUBSTRING(PhoneNumber, 4, 3) + '-' + 
                  SUBSTRING(PhoneNumber, 7, 4)

Incorporated Kane's suggestion, you can compute the phone number's formatting at runtime. One possible approach would be to use scalar functions for this purpose (works in SQL Server):

CREATE FUNCTION FormatPhoneNumber(@phoneNumber VARCHAR(10))
RETURNS VARCHAR(12)
BEGIN
    RETURN SUBSTRING(@phoneNumber, 1, 3) + '-' + 
           SUBSTRING(@phoneNumber, 4, 3) + '-' + 
           SUBSTRING(@phoneNumber, 7, 4)
END

I'd generally recommend you leave the formatting up to your front-end code and just return the data as-is from SQL. However, to do it in SQL, I'd recommend you create a user-defined function to format it. Something like this:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fnFormatPhoneNumber](@PhoneNo VARCHAR(20))
RETURNS VARCHAR(25)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Formatted VARCHAR(25)

IF (LEN(@PhoneNo) <> 10)
    SET @Formatted = @PhoneNo
ELSE
    SET @Formatted = LEFT(@PhoneNo, 3) + '-' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNo, 4, 3) + '-' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNo, 7, 4)

RETURN @Formatted
END
GO

Which you can then use like this:

SELECT [dbo].[fnFormatPhoneNumber](PhoneNumber) AS PhoneNumber
FROM SomeTable

It has a safeguard in, in case the phone number stored isn't the expected number of digits long, is blank, null etc - it won't error.

EDIT: Just clocked on you want to update your existing data. The main bit that's relevant from my answer then is that you need to protect against "dodgy"/incomplete data (i.e. what if some existing values are only 5 characters long)

Above users mentioned, those solutions are very basic and they won't work if the database has different phone formats like:

(123)123-4564
123-456-4564
1234567989
etc

Here is a more complex solution that will work with ANY input given:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ufn_FormatPhone] (@PhoneNumber VARCHAR(32))
RETURNS VARCHAR(32)
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @Phone CHAR(32)

    SET @Phone = @PhoneNumber

    -- cleanse phone number string
    WHILE PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', @PhoneNumber) > 0
        SET @PhoneNumber = REPLACE(@PhoneNumber, SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', @PhoneNumber), 1), '')

    -- skip foreign phones
    IF (
            SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, 1, 1) = '1'
            OR SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, 1, 1) = '+'
            OR SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, 1, 1) = '0'
            )
        AND LEN(@PhoneNumber) > 11
        RETURN @Phone

    -- build US standard phone number
    SET @Phone = @PhoneNumber
    SET @PhoneNumber = '(' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, 1, 3) + ') ' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, 4, 3) + '-' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNumber, 7, 4)

    IF LEN(@Phone) - 10 > 1
        SET @PhoneNumber = @PhoneNumber + ' X' + SUBSTRING(@Phone, 11, LEN(@Phone) - 10)

    RETURN @PhoneNumber
END