I don't really know SQL very well, but I've run into an issue where I receive data like this:
Account Name
Tags
Demo
Tag A,Tag C,Tag E
I need to write some SQL that will take the above table of data, and convert it over to this:
Account Name
Tags
Demo
Tag A
-------------
----------------------
Demo
Tag C
-------------
----------------------
Demo
Tag E
It needs to be pretty dynamic and non specific, because the list of possible tag names will be constantly changing. The only constant is that they will be a comma separated list and I need to break them out into separate rows of data like above.
Am I missing something obvious here in SQL that accomplishes the goal?
I am not really an SQL developer, so I don't have many details to share on what I've tried so far. More just Google searches not turning up any function that appears to do what I need.
Related
Thank you for checking my question out!
I'm trying to write a query for a very specific problem we're having at my workplace and I can't seem to get my head around it.
Short version: I need to be able to target columns by their name, and more specifically by a part of their name that will be consistent throughout all the columns I need to combine or compare.
More details:
We have (for example), 5 different surveys. They have many questions each, but SOME of the questions are part of the same metric, and we need to create a generic field that keeps it. There's more background to the "why" of that, but it's pretty important for us at this point.
We were able to kind of solve this with either COALESCE() or CASE statements but the challenge is that, as more surveys/survey versions continue to grow, our vendor inevitably generates new columns for each survey and its questions.
Take this example, which is what we do currently and works well enough:
CASE
WHEN SURVEY_NAME = 'Service1' THEN SERV1_REC
WHEN SURVEY_NAME = 'Notice1' THEN FNOL1_REC
WHEN SURVEY_NAME = 'Status1' THEN STAT1_REC
WHEN SURVEY_NAME = 'Sales1' THEN SALE1_REC
WHEN SURVEY_NAME = 'Transfer1' THEN Null
ELSE Null
END REC
And also this alternative which works well:
COALESCE(SERV1_REC, FNOL1_REC, STAT1_REC, SALE1_REC) as REC
But as I mentioned, eventually we will have a "SALE2_REC" for example, and we'll need them BOTH on this same statement. I want to create something where having to come into the SQL and make changes isn't needed. Given that the columns will ALWAYS be named "something#_REC" for this specific metric, is there any way to achieve something like:
COALESCE(all columns named LIKE '%_REC') as REC
Bonus! Related, might be another way around this same problem:
Would there also be a way to achieve this?
SELECT (columns named LIKE '%_REC') FROM ...
Thank you very much in advance for all your time and attention.
-Kendall
Table and column information in Db2 are managed in the system catalog. The relevant views are SYSCAT.TABLES and SYSCAT.COLUMNS. You could write:
select colname, tabname from syscat.tables
where colname like some_expression
and syscat.tabname='MYTABLE
Note that the LIKE predicate supports expressions based on a variable or the result of a scalar function. So you could match it against some dynamic input.
Have you considered storing the more complicated properties in JSON or XML values? Db2 supports both and you can query those values with regular SQL statements.
I have a table column that holds the description which looks like this:
id description
--------------------------------------
100 ... post-doctorate ...
200 ... postdoctorate ...
300 ... post doctorate ...
I implemented a searching mechanism where users can search for keywords and somehow I'm having issues searching for these words. Even though I'm using LIKE in my WHERE clause I can't seem to include all 3 rows above.
Query
WHERE description LIKE '%post-doctorate%'
I would like to be able to search all 3 of them using any of the variations illustrated as my keyword.
I also looked at using SOUNDEX but even that doesn't work.
Please Note
Kindly ignore the fact that I'm not using parameterized queries in here. I'm aware of what it is and how to use it but this was an old project I created.
A method using like is:
WHERE description LIKE '%post%doctorate%'
But that is much more general than you want. So, use regular expressions:
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(description, 'post[- ]?doctorate'
Or, if you want to allow any character to appear at most once:
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(description, 'post(.)?doctorate'
Hello I want to display results from unrelated tables where a text string exists in a column which is common to all tables in the database.
I can get the desired result with this:
SELECT *
FROM Table1
WHERE Title LIKE '%Text%'
UNION
SELECT *
FROM Table2
WHERE Title LIKE '%Text%'`
However my question is is there a more efficient way to go about this as I need to search dozens of tbls. Thanks for any help you can give!
ps the system I am using supports most dialects but would prefer to keep it simple with SQL Server as that is what I am used to.
There is a SP script you can find online called SearchAllTables (http://vyaskn.tripod.com/search_all_columns_in_all_tables.htm).
When you call it pass in the string, it will return the tables and columns as well as the full string.
You can modify it to work with other datatypes quite easily. It's a fantastic resource for tasks exactly like yours.
I have a table containing a series of survey responses, structured like this:
Question Category | Question Number | Respondent ID | Answer
This seemed the most logical storage for the data. The combination of Question Category, Question Number, and Respondent ID is unique.
Problem is, I've been asked for a report with the Respondent ID as the columns, with Answer as the rows. Since Answer is free-text, the numeric-expecting PIVOT command doesn't help. It would be great if each row was a specific Question Category / Question Number pairing so that all of the information is displayed in a single table.
Is this possible? I'm guessing a certain amount of dynamic SQL will be required, especially with the expected 50-odd surveys to display.
I think this task should be done by your client code - trying to do this transposing on SQL side is not very good idea. Such SQL (even if it can be constructed) will likely be extremely complicated and fragile.
First of all, you should count how many distinct answers are there - you probably don't want to create report 1000 columns wide if all answers are different. Also, you probably want to make sure that answers are narrow - what if someone gave really bad 1KB wide answer?
Then, you should construct your report (would that be HTML or something else) dynamically based on results of your standard, non-transposed SQL.
For example, in HTML you can create as many columns as you want using <th>column</th> for table header and <td>value</td> for data cell - as long as you know already how many columns are going to be in your output result.
To me, it seems that the problem is the number of columns. You don't know how many respondents there are.
One idea would be to concatenate the respondent ids. You can do this in SQL Server as:
select distinct Answer,
(select cast(RespondentId as varchar(255))+'; '
from Responses r2
where r2.Answer = r.Answer
for xml path ('')
) AllResponders
from Responses r
(This is untested so may have syntax errors.)
If reporting services or excel power pivot are possibilities for the report then they could both probably accomplish what you want easier than a straight sql query. In RS you can use a tablix, and in power pivot a pivot table. Both avoid having to define your pivot columns in an sql pivot statement, and both can dynamically determine the column names from a tabular result set.
I want to show the closest related item for a product. So say I am showing a product and the style number is SG-sfs35s. Is there a way to select whatever product's style number is closest to that?
Thanks.
EDIT: to answer your questions. Well I definitely want to keep the first 2 letters as that is the manufacturer code but as for the part after the first dash, just whatever matches closest. so for example SG-sfs35s would match SG-shs35s much more than SG-sht64s. I hope this makes sense whenever I do LIKE product_style_number it only pulls the exact match.
There normally isn't a simple way to match product codes that are roughly similar.
A more SQL friendly solution is to create a new table that maps each product to all the products it is similar to.
This table would either need to be maintained manually, or a more sophisticated script can be executed periodically to update it.
If your product codes follow a consistent pattern (all the letters are the same for similar products, with only the numbers changing), then you should be able to use a regular expression to match the similar items. There are docs on this here...
It sounds like what you want is levenshtein distance .
Unfortunately, there isn't a built-in levenshtein function for mysql, but some folks have come up with a user-defined function that does it(deadlink).
You will probably want to do it as a stored procedure, as I expect that the algorithm may not be trivial.
For example, you may split the term at the -, so you have two parts. You do a LIKE query on each part and use that to make a decision.
You could just loop though, replacing the last character with "%" until you get at least one result, in your stored procedure.
Sounds like you need something like Lucene, though i'm not sure if that would be overkill for your situation. But it certainly would be able to do text searches and return the ones most similar first.
If you need something more simple I would try to start by searching with the full product code, then if that doesn't work try to use wildcards/remove some characters until you return a result.
JD Isaacks.
This situation of yours is very simple to solve.
It`s not like you need to use Artificial Intelligence like the Google.
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_wildcards.asp
Take a look at this manual at w3schools about wildcards to use with your SELECT code.
But also you will need to create a new table with 3 columns: LeftCode, RightCode and WildCard.
Example:
Rows on Table:
LeftCode = SG | RightCode = 35s | WildCard = SG-s_s35s
LeftCode = SG | RightCode = 64s | WildCard = SG-s_t64s
SQL Code
If the user typed the code that matches the row1 of the table:
SELECT * FROM PRODUCTS WHERE CODE LIKE "$WildCard";
Where $WildCard is the PHP variable containing the column 3 of the new table.
I hope I helped, even 4 years late...