Find similar sales orders in SQL - sql

Question

This is my first post.
I work at a manufacturing company and most of the products we are making are custom made.
We believe we can find some commonalities in the products we sale.
To do this, we need to analyze sales orders and compare them to all the sales orders in our system to find identical ones.
Here's an example in form of a SQL result:
etc...
+------------------------------+
| OrderId ProductCode Qty |
+------------------------------+
| SS1234 Widget1 1 |
| SS1234 Widget2 3 |
| SS1234 Widget3 1 |
+------------------------------+
I would like to find orders similar to SS1234, ie orders with the same products (widget1, widget2 and widget3) and the same quantities.
How do I do this in SQL Server 2008R2?
Thanks for your help!
Raf

Answer 1

I won't be able to test this before I go to bed for the evening. This is an overly verbose approach, but I wanted to grind this out as quickly as possible so I tried to use structure / syntax that I know well, instead of trying to write more concise, efficient code that would require I lean on the documentation. Basically, we're counting the number of items in each order, selecting a pair of order ids every time we find two matching line items, then we count how many times an exact pair of order IDs appears. Use inner joins to filter out pairs that matched fewer times than there are products in the order.
WITH
ProductCounts AS (
SELECT COUNT(OrderID) AS ProductCodesInOrder, OrderID
FROM Table
GROUP BY OrderID
), MatchingLineItems AS (
SELECT A.OrderID AS FirstOrderID, B.OrderID AS SecondOrderID
FROM Table AS A
INNER JOIN Table AS B
ON A.ProductCode = B.ProductCode AND A.Qty = B.Qty
ORDER BY FirstOrderID, SecondOrderID
), MatchTotals AS (
SELECT
COUNT(FirstOrderID) AS Matches, FirstOrderID, SecondOrderID
FROM MatchingLineItems
GROUP BY FirstOrderID, SecondOrderID
), FirstMatches AS (
SELECT MatchTotals.FirstOrderID, MatchTotals.SecondOrderID, MatchTotals.Matches
FROM MatchTotals
INNER JOIN ProductCounts
ON MatchTotals.FirstOrderID = ProductCounts.OrderID
WHERE MatchTotals.Matches = ProductCounts.ProductCodesInOrder
)
SELECT FirstMatches.FirstOrderID, FirstMatches.SecondOrderID
FROM FirstMatches
INNER JOIN ProductCounts
ON FirstMatches.SecondOrderID = ProductCounts.OrderID
WHERE FirstMatches.Matches = ProductCounts.ProductCodesInOrder

Answer 2

Setup:
CREATE TABLE #ord (
OrderId VARCHAR(20),
ProductCode VARCHAR(40),
qty int
)
INSERT INTO #ord (OrderId, ProductCode, Qty)
VALUES
('SS1234','Widget1',1)
,('SS1234','Widget2',3)
,('SS1234','Widget3',1)
,('SS1234a','Widget1',1)
,('SS1234a','Widget2',3)
,('SS1234a','Widget3',1)
,('xSS1234','Widget1',1)
,('xSS1234','Widget2',3)
,('xSS1234','Widget3',1)
,('xSS1234','Widget4',1)
,('ySS1234','Widget1',10)
,('ySS1234','Widget2',3)
,('ySS1234','Widget3',1)
,('zSS1234','Widget2',3)
,('zSS1234','Widget3',1)
;
Query:
with CTE as (
select distinct
o.OrderID, ca.ProductString, ca.QtyString
from #ord o
cross apply (
SELECT
STUFF((
SELECT
', ' + o2.ProductCode
FROM #ord o2
WHERE o.OrderID = o2.OrderID
ORDER BY o2.ProductCode
FOR XML PATH ('')
)
, 1, 1, '')
, STUFF((
SELECT
', ' + cast(o2.Qty as varchar)
FROM #ord o2
WHERE o.OrderID = o2.OrderID
ORDER BY o2.ProductCode
FOR XML PATH ('')
)
, 1, 1, '')
) ca (ProductString, QtyString)
)
select
ProductString, QtyString, count(*) Num_Orders
from CTE
group by
ProductString, QtyString
having
count(*) > 1
order by
Num_Orders DESC
, ProductString
Result:
ProductString QtyString Num_Orders
Widget1, Widget2, Widget3 1, 3, 1 2
See: http://rextester.com/DJEN59714