I'm having a table with 6 columns and I want to perform a select query based on all 6 columns, but one column's data is mistyped/incorrect and I get no data returned. What could be used to still have my data returned even though some data is incorrect, but I still want most relevant records to be returned?
Don't know how much this can help you, But you can give a try using SOUNDEX function in SQL server.
Check this link for information on SOUNDEX Function
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The problem is that a count function evaluating only column A get different results depending on what's in other columns if those columns are included in the range even if not included in the select criteria.
This is a stripped down version of the problem. The additional columns are needed because of a where condition dependent on data in a different column. But the problem manifests even when the where condition is removed from the query.
A sample spreadsheet including a loom vid of the problem can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BJ6qaTcEiXZlzD1opxMHNhFyIBM1CDJPCJ5gr9x_32k/edit?usp=sharing
Any insights or work-arounds will be appreciated.
There've been 18 views and no insights or work-arounds. Nor have I found a work-around so I'm assuming this is a gSheet bug. How does one go about submitting a bug to G?
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 got a table with 75 columns,. what is the sql statement to display only the columns with values in in ?
thanks
It's true that a similar statement doesn't exist (in a SELECT you can use condition filters only for the rows, not for the columns). But you could try to write a (bit tricky) procedure. It must check which are the columns that contains at least one not NULL/empty value, using queries. When you get this list of columns just join them in a string with a comma between each one and compose a query that you can run, returning what you wanted.
EDIT: I thought about it and I think you can do it with a procedure but under one of these conditions:
find a way to retrieve column names dynamically in the procedure, that is the metadata (I never heard about it, but I'm new with procedures)
or hardcode all column names (loosing generality)
You could collect column names inside an array, if stored procedures of your DBMS support arrays (or write the procedure in a programming language like C), and loop on them, making a SELECT each time, checking if it's an empty* column or not. If it contains at least one value concatenate it in a string where column names are comma-separated. Finally you can make your query with only not-empty columns!
Alternatively to stored procedure you could write a short program (eg in Java) where you can deal with a better flexibility.
*if you check for NULL values it will be simple, but if you check for empty values you will need to manage with each column data type... another array with data types?
I would suggest that you write a SELECT statement and define which COLUMNS you wish to display and then save that QUERY as a VIEW.
This will save you the trouble of typing in the column names every time you wish to run that query.
As marc_s pointed out in the comments, there is no select statement to hide columns of data.
You could do a pre-parse and dynamically create a statement to do this, but this would be a very inefficient thing to do from a SQL performance perspective. Would strongly advice against what you are trying to do.
A simplified version of this is to just select the relevant columns, which was what I needed personally. A quick search of what we're dealing with in a table
SELECT * FROM table1 LIMIT 10;
-> shows 20 columns where im interested in 3 of them. Limit is just to not overflow the console.
SELECT column1,column3,colum19 FROM table1 WHERE column3='valueX';
It is a bit of a manual filter but it works for what I need.
I have the probably unenviable task of writing a data migration query to populate existing records with a value for a new column being added to a table on a production database. The table has somewhere in the order of 200,000 rows.
The source of the value is in some XML that is stored in the database. I have some XPath that will pull out the value I want, and using extractValue to get the value out seems all good, until the number of records being updated by the query starts getting larger than the few I had in my test DB.
Once the record set grows to some random amount of size, somewhere around 500 rows, then I start getting the error "ORA-19025: EXTRACTVALUE returns value of only one node". Figuring that there was some odd row in the database for which there wasn't a unique result for the XPath, I tried to limit down the records in the query to isolate the bad record. But as soon as I shrunk the record set, the error disappeared. There is actually no row that will return more than one value for this XPath query. It looks like there's something fishy happening with extractValue.
Does anyone know anything about this? I'm not an SQL expert, and even then have spent more time on SQL Server than Oracle. So if I can't get this to work I guess I'm left to do some messing with cursors or something.
Any advice/help? If it helps, we're running 10g on the server. Thanks!
It's almost certain that at least one row from the table with the source XML has an invalid value. Rewrite the query to try and find it.
For example, use the XMLPath predicate that would give you the node in the second position (I don't currently have access to a db with XML objects, so I can't guarantee the following is syntactically perfect):
SELECT SourceKey
, EXTRACTVALUE(SourceXML, '/foo/bar/baz[1]')
, EXTRACTVALUE(SourceXML, '/foo/bar/baz[2]')
FROM SourceTable
WHERE EXTRACTVALUE(SourceXML, '/foo/bar/baz[2]') IS NOT NULL;
I use PostgreSQL database and C to connect to it. With a help from dyntest.pgc I can access to number of columns and their (SQL3) types from a result table of a query.
Problem is that when result table is empty, I can't fetch a row to get this data. Does anyone have a solution for this?
Query can be SELECT 1,2,3 - so, I think I can't use INFORMATION SCHEMA for this because there is no base table.
I'm not familiar with ecpg, but with libpq you should be able to call PQnfields to get the number of fields and then call various PQf* routines (like PQftype, PQfname) to get detailed info. Those functions take a PGResult, which you have even if there are no rows.
Problem is that when result table is empty, I can't fetch a row to get this data. Does anyone have a solution for this?
I am not sure to really get what you want, but it seems the answer is in the question. If the table is empty, there are no rows...
The only solution here seems you must wait a non empty result table, and then get the needed informations.