Can I use string_split with enforcing combination of labels? - sql

Question

So I have the following table:
Id Name Label
---------------------------------------
1 FirstTicket bike|motorbike
2 SecondTicket bike
3 ThirdTicket e-bike|motorbike
4 FourthTicket car|truck
I want to use string_split function to identify rows that have both bike and motorbike labels.
So the desired output in my example will be just the first row:
Id Name Label
--------------------------------------
1 FirstTicket bike|motorbike
Currently, I am using the following query but it is returning row 1,2 and 3. I only want the first. Is it possible?
SELECT Id, Name, Label FROM tickets
WHERE EXISTS (
SELECT * FROM STRING_SPLIT(Label, '|')
WHERE value IN ('bike', 'motorbike')
)

Answer 1

You can use APPLY & do aggregation :
SELECT t.id, t.FirstTicket, t.Label
FROM tickets t CROSS APPLY
STRING_SPLIT(t.Label, '|') t1
WHERE t1.value IN ('bike', 'motorbike')
GROUP BY t.id, t.FirstTicket, t.Label
HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT t1.value) = 2;
However, this breaks the normalization rules you should have separate table tickets.

Answer 2

You could just use string functions for this:
select t.*
from mytable t
where
'|' + label + '|' like '%|bike|%'
and '|' + label + '|' like '%|motorbike|%'
I would expect this to be more efficient than other methods that split and aggregate.
Please note, however, that you should really consider fixing your data model. Instead of storing delimited lists, you should have a separated table to represent the relation between tickets and labels, with one row per ticket/label tuple. Storing delimited lists in database column is a well-know SQL antipattern, that should be avoided at all cost (hard to maintain, hard to query, hard to enforce data integrity, inefficicent, ...). You can have a look at this famous SO post for more on this topic.

Answer 3

Yogesh beat me to it; my solution is similar but with a HUGE performance improvement worth pointing out. We'll start with this sample data:
SET NOCOUNT ON;
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#tickets','U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #tickets;
CREATE TABLE #tickets (Id INT, [Name] VARCHAR(50), Label VARCHAR(1000));
INSERT #tickets (Id, [Name], Label)
VALUES
(1,'FirstTicket' , 'bike|motorbike'),
(2,'SecondTicket', 'bike'),
(3,'ThirdTicket' , 'e-bike|motorbike'),
(4,'FourthTicket', 'car|truck'),
(5,'FifthTicket', 'motorbike|bike');
Now the original and much improved version:
-- Original
SELECT t.id, t.[Name], t.Label
FROM #tickets AS t
CROSS APPLY STRING_SPLIT(t.Label, '|') t1
WHERE t1.[value] IN ('bike', 'motorbike')
GROUP BY t.id, t.[Name], t.Label
HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT t1.[value]) = 2;
-- Improved Version Leveraging APPLY to avoid a sort
SELECT t.Id, t.[Name], t.Label
FROM #tickets AS t
CROSS APPLY
(
SELECT 1
FROM STRING_SPLIT(t.Label,'|') AS split
WHERE split.[value] IN ('bike','motorbike')
HAVING COUNT(*) = 2
) AS isMatch(TF);
Now the execution plans:
If you compare the costs: the "sortless" version is query 4.36 times faster than the original. In reality it's more because, with the first version, we're not just sorting, we are sorting three columns - an int and two (n)varchars. Because sorting costs are N * LOG(N), the original query gets exponentially slower the more rows you throw at it.