Search single entity which is presented by multiple rows SQL - sql

Question

I have User table which contains same user represented by different entities all around. For example
User Table
==========================
id name
1 John Doe
2 Doe, John
3 Nicholas Cage
4 BlackRiderXXX
5 Nicholas cage
where users John Doe, Doe, John, BlackRiderXXX are the same people. Also, Nicholas Cage and Nicholas cage are the same people. Other tables refer to user.id randomly based on which user object did the action.
For Action table it'll look like
Action Table
==========================
id user_id some_other_stuff
1 1 ...
2 2 ...
3 1 ...
4 4 ...
5 3 ...
Where the actions 1,2,3,4 are all done by John Doe.
I'll have these users merged by the user manually meaning we'd know who is whom. They'd also select which User is the one they'd like to be as their main user account so we need to know this information as well.
I'm simplifiying a bit but I have a dozen tables which are like the Action table I provided above. We have mainly two use cases on how we will need to query:
1) Find actions which are done by user X (which should check all the users entities belonging to user X)
2) Find actions and group unique users
Main point is we will be using it everywhere around the codebase on 100+ queries so we want to design it well. How can I construct a system where the query will be simple enough also powerful enough to handle different querying ways?
Thanks
PS: We are using PostgreSQL

Answer 1

Why not include the "main" user in the first table?
User Table
id name main_user_id
1 John Doe 1
2 Doe, John 1
3 Nicholas Cage 2
4 BlackRiderXXX 1
5 Nicholas cage 2
Then you would join on:
select . . .
from actions a join
users u
on a.user_id = u.id
where u.main_user_id = 1;
If you want this selectable per end user, then use a different table:
create table end_user_users (
end_user_users_id serial primary key,
end_user_id int references end_users (end_user_id),
end_user_user_id int references users (id),
end_user_main_user_id int references users (id)
);
Then the query would look like:
select . . .
from actions a join
end_users_users euu
on euu.end_user_user_id = a.user_id and
euu.end_user_id = $my_id
where euu.end_user_main_user_id = 1;

Answer 2

You can use regexp_replace(),initcap() and trim() functions to refine and extract the common name strings to be grouped, and then generate values for newly created action_id column depending on them :
with new_action0 as
(
select u.id as id,
case when strpos(u.name,',') > 0 then
initcap(trim(regexp_replace(trim(u.name),'(.*),(.*)','\2 \1')))
else
case when lower(trim(u.name))='blackriderxxx' then
'John Doe'
else
trim(initcap(u.name))
end
end as name
from action u
)
select n.id, dense_rank() over (order by n.name) as user_id
from new_action0 n;
Demo
A new decent user table can be created by using this query with create table .. as statement