Sql: Join separately ordered tables - sql

Question

Let's assume I have two sets of events:
Foo
Bar
where I would always expect Bar to follow Foo: Foo -> Bar. I have a table of Foo values:
|----|---------------|------|
| id | ordering-foo | other|
|----|---------------|------|
|1 |1 |X |
|1 |2 |Y |
|----|---------------|------|
|2 |1 |X |
|----|---------------|------|
|3 |2 |X |
|----|---------------|------|
|4 |1 |X |
|4 |2 |Y |
|----|---------------|------|
the ordering field indicates the order at which the Foo events happened per id.
I also have a set of Bar events:
|----|---------------|-------|
| id | ordering_bar | other |
|----|---------------|-------|
|1 |A |XX |
|1 |B |YY |
|----|---------------|-------|
|3 |B |XX |
|----|---------------|-------|
|4 |A |XX |
|----|---------------|-------|
Note that:
while Foo and Bar are both ordered, they don't share the same ordering and we can't simply join them on the said ordering values. Here I have simplified them to numbers vs strings. In the problem that inspired this question, these are the timestamps for each Foo/Bar event respectively, which has the property of foo.ordering < bar.ordering for a Foo->Bar sequence of events, but that's probably not massively helpful to this problem.
The ordering isn't "???", ie just because we have an order entry of 2(B) doesn't mean we'd necessarily have a 1(A) entry. see entries for id: 3
It's possible for us to have a record for Foo but not the subsequent Bar, ie see entries for id: 2, 4
I want to end up with:
|----|----------|-----------|-----------|
| id | ordering | other-foo | other-bar |
| 1 | 1 | X | XX |
| 1 | 2 | Y | YY |
|----|----------|-----------|-----------|
| 2 | 1 | X | null |
|----|----------|-----------|-----------|
| 3 | 2 | X | XX |
|----|----------|-----------|-----------|
| 4 | 1 | X | XX |
| 4 | 2 | Y | null |
|----|----------|-----------|-----------|
How can I get there? In my special case of this problem I only ever have two possible events per event type, per id. ie the ordering values can only ever be: 1,2 / A,B I played around with things like:
case
when count(*) over (partition by foo.id) = 1 and count(*) over (partition by bar.id) = 1 then foo.ordering_foo
when count(*) over (partition by foo.id) = 2 and count(*) over (partition by bar.id) = 1 then 1
when count(*) over (partition by foo.id) = 2 and count(*) over (partition by bar.id) = 2 and max(bar.ordering_bar) over (partition by bar.id) = bar.ordering_bar then 2
when count(*) over (partition by foo.id) = 2 and count(*) over (partition by bar.id) = 2 and min(bar.ordering_bar) over (partition by bar.odering_bar)= bar.ordering_bar then 1
else -1
end as ordering,
ie, I treat each case of:
1 foo, 1 bar
2 foo, 1 bar
2 foo, 2 bar
separately to com up with a composite order. Tho it is likely error-prone, and most importantly I realise this is:
horrible to read/maintain
not flexible enough.
hard to use to get other fields.
So I'm curious if you could solve this more elegantly in the generic case.

Answer 1

You may join the tables using ROW_NUMBER as the following:
SELECT T.id ,T.ordering_foo, T.other other_foo, D.other other_bar
FROM
(
SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY id ORDER BY ordering_foo) foo_rn
FROM foo
) T
LEFT JOIN
(
SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY id ORDER BY ordering_bar) bar_rn
FROM bar
) D
ON T.ID=D.ID AND T.foo_rn=D.bar_rn
ORDER BY T.id ,T.ordering_foo
See a demo on SQL Server.