I have a table where I have field traffic_num(varchar) that contains this data
A100
A586
A4594
A125
A2
A492
now I want to sort that data ascending order. It would be really easy if traffic_num contains only number (without letter A), then I could cast varchar to integer CAST(traffic_num as SIGNED INTEGER) ASC. But what to do in this situation?
You can use substr to first order by the first alphabet character and then by the number following it.
select * from tablename
order by substr(traffic_num,1,1), cast(substr(traffic_num,2) as signed integer)
A simple way to do this is by sorting by the length and then the value:
order by length(traffic_num), traffic_num
This works when the values are integers.
Related
How to get max on comma separated values in Original_Ids column and get max value in one column and remaining ids in different column.
|Original_Ids | Max_Id| Remaining_Ids |
|123,534,243,345| 534 | 123,234,345 |
Upadte -
If I already have Max_id and just need below equation?
Remaining_Ids = Original_Ids - Max_id
Thanks
Thanks to the excellent possibilities of array manipulation in Postgres, this could be done relatively easy by converting the string to an array and from there to a set.
Then regular queries on that set are possible. With max() the maximum can be selected and with EXCEPT ALL the maximum can be removed from the set.
A set can then be converted to an array and with array_to_string() and the array can be converted to a delimited string again.
SELECT ids original_ids,
(SELECT max(un.id::integer)
FROM unnest(string_to_array(ids,
',')) un(id)) max_id,
array_to_string(ARRAY((SELECT un.id::integer
FROM unnest(string_to_array(ids,
',')) un(id)
EXCEPT ALL
SELECT max(un.id::integer)
FROM unnest(string_to_array(ids,
',')) un(id))),
',') remaining_ids
FROM elbat;
Another option would have been regexp_split_to_table() which directly produces a set (or regexp_split_to_array() but than we'd had the possible regular expression overhead and still had to convert the array to a set).
But nevertheless you just should (almost) never use delimited lists (nor arrays). Use a table, that's (almost) always the best option.
SQL Fiddle
You can use a window function (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/tutorial-window.html) to get the max element per unnested array. After that you can reaggregate the elements and remove the calculated max value from the array.
Result:
a max_elem remaining
123,534,243,345 534 123,243,345
3,23,1 23 3,17
42 42
56,123,234,345,345 345 56,123,234
This query needs only one split/unnest as well as only one max calculation.
SELECT
a,
max_elem,
array_remove(array_agg(elements), max_elem) as remaining -- C
FROM (
SELECT
*,
MAX(elements) OVER (PARTITION BY a) as max_elem -- B
FROM (
SELECT
a,
unnest((string_to_array(a, ','))::int[]) as elements -- A
FROM arrays
)s
)s
GROUP BY a, max_elem
A: string_to_array converts the string list into an array. Because the arrays are treated as string arrays you need the cast them into integer arrays by adding ::int[]. The unnest() expands all array elements into own rows.
B: window function MAX gives the maximum value of the single arrays as max_elem
C: array_agg reaggregates the elements through the GROUP BY id. After that array_remove removes the max_elem value from the array.
If you do not like to store them as pure arrays but as string list again you could add array_to_string. But I wouldn't recommend this because your data are integer arrays and not strings. For every further calculation you would need this string cast. A even better way (as already stated by #stickybit) is not to store the elements as arrays but as unnested data. As you can see in nearly every operation should would do the unnest before.
Note:
It would be better to use an ID to adress the columns/arrays instead of the origin string as in SQL Fiddle with IDs
If you install the extension intarray this is quite easy.
First you need to create the extension (you have to be superuser to do that):
create extension intarray;
Then you can do the following:
select original_ids,
original_ids[1] as max_id,
sort(original_ids - original_ids[1]) as remaining_ids
from (
select sort_desc(string_to_array(original_ids,',')::int[]) as original_ids
from bad_design
) t
But you shouldn't be storing comma separated values to begin with
I've got a Postgres ORDER BY issue with the following table:
em_code name
EM001 AAA
EM999 BBB
EM1000 CCC
To insert a new record to the table,
I select the last record with SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY em_code DESC
Strip alphabets from em_code usiging reg exp and store in ec_alpha
Cast the remating part to integer ec_num
Increment by one ec_num++
Pad with sufficient zeors and prefix ec_alpha again
When em_code reaches EM1000, the above algorithm fails.
First step will return EM999 instead EM1000 and it will again generate EM1000 as new em_code, breaking the unique key constraint.
Any idea how to select EM1000?
Since Postgres 9.6, it is possible to specify a collation which will sort columns with numbers naturally.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/collation.html
-- First create a collation with numeric sorting
CREATE COLLATION numeric (provider = icu, locale = 'en#colNumeric=yes');
-- Alter table to use the collation
ALTER TABLE "employees" ALTER COLUMN "em_code" type TEXT COLLATE numeric;
Now just query as you would otherwise.
SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY em_code
On my data, I get results in this order (note that it also sorts foreign numerals):
Value
0
0001
001
1
06
6
13
۱۳
14
One approach you can take is to create a naturalsort function for this. Here's an example, written by Postgres legend RhodiumToad.
create or replace function naturalsort(text)
returns bytea language sql immutable strict as $f$
select string_agg(convert_to(coalesce(r[2], length(length(r[1])::text) || length(r[1])::text || r[1]), 'SQL_ASCII'),'\x00')
from regexp_matches($1, '0*([0-9]+)|([^0-9]+)', 'g') r;
$f$;
Source: http://www.rhodiumtoad.org.uk/junk/naturalsort.sql
To use it simply call the function in your order by:
SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY naturalsort(em_code) DESC
The reason is that the string sorts alphabetically (instead of numerically like you would want it) and 1 sorts before 9.
You could solve it like this:
SELECT * FROM employees
ORDER BY substring(em_code, 3)::int DESC;
It would be more efficient to drop the redundant 'EM' from your em_code - if you can - and save an integer number to begin with.
Answer to question in comment
To strip any and all non-digits from a string:
SELECT regexp_replace(em_code, E'\\D','','g')
FROM employees;
\D is the regular expression class-shorthand for "non-digits".
'g' as 4th parameter is the "globally" switch to apply the replacement to every occurrence in the string, not just the first.
After replacing every non-digit with the empty string, only digits remain.
This always comes up in questions and in my own development and I finally tired of tricky ways of doing this. I finally broke down and implemented it as a PostgreSQL extension:
https://github.com/Bjond/pg_natural_sort_order
It's free to use, MIT license.
Basically it just normalizes the numerics (zero pre-pending numerics) within strings such that you can create an index column for full-speed sorting au naturel. The readme explains.
The advantage is you can have a trigger do the work and not your application code. It will be calculated at machine-speed on the PostgreSQL server and migrations adding columns become simple and fast.
you can use just this line
"ORDER BY length(substring(em_code FROM '[0-9]+')), em_code"
I wrote about this in detail in this related question:
Humanized or natural number sorting of mixed word-and-number strings
(I'm posting this answer as a useful cross-reference only, so it's community wiki).
I came up with something slightly different.
The basic idea is to create an array of tuples (integer, string) and then order by these. The magic number 2147483647 is int32_max, used so that strings are sorted after numbers.
ORDER BY ARRAY(
SELECT ROW(
CAST(COALESCE(NULLIF(match[1], ''), '2147483647') AS INTEGER),
match[2]
)
FROM REGEXP_MATCHES(col_to_sort_by, '(\d*)|(\D*)', 'g')
AS match
)
I thought about another way of doing this that uses less db storage than padding and saves time than calculating on the fly.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/47522040/935122
I've also put it on GitHub
https://github.com/ccsalway/dbNaturalSort
The following solution is a combination of various ideas presented in another question, as well as some ideas from the classic solution:
create function natsort(s text) returns text immutable language sql as $$
select string_agg(r[1] || E'\x01' || lpad(r[2], 20, '0'), '')
from regexp_matches(s, '(\D*)(\d*)', 'g') r;
$$;
The design goals of this function were simplicity and pure string operations (no custom types and no arrays), so it can easily be used as a drop-in solution, and is trivial to be indexed over.
Note: If you expect numbers with more than 20 digits, you'll have to replace the hard-coded maximum length 20 in the function with a suitable larger length. Note that this will directly affect the length of the resulting strings, so don't make that value larger than needed.
We have legacy table where one of the columns part of composite key was manually filled with values:
code
------
'001'
'002'
'099'
etc.
Now, we have feature request in which we must know MAX(code) in order to give user next possible value, in example case form above next value is '100'.
We tried to experiment with this but we still can't find any reasonable explanation how DB2 engine calculates that
MAX('001', '099', '576') is '576'
MAX('099', '99', 'www') is '99' and so on.
Any help or suggestion would be much appreciated!
You already have the answer to getting the maximum numeric value, but to answer the other part with regard to 'www','099','99'.
The AS/400 uses EBCDIC to store values, this is different to ASCII in several ways, the most important for your purposes is that Alpha characters come before numbers, which is the opposite of Ascii.
So on your Max() your 3 strings will be sorted and the highest EBCDIC value used so
'www'
'099'
'99 '
As you can see your '99' string is really '99 ' so it is higher that the one with the leading zero.
Cast it to int before applying max()
For the numeric maximum -- filter out the non-numeric values and cast to a numeric for aggregation:
SELECT MAX(INT(FLD1))
WHERE FLD1 <> ' '
AND TRANSLATE(FLD1, '0123456789', '0123456789') = FLD1
SQL Reference: TRANSLATE
And the reasonable explanation:
SQL Reference: MAX
This max working well in your type definition, when you want do max on integer values then convert values to integer before calling MAX, but i see you mixing max with string 'www' how you imagine this works?
Filter integer only values, cast it to int and call max. This is not good designed solution but looking at your problem i think is enough.
Sharing the solution for postgresql
which worked for me.
Suppose here temporary_id is of type character in database. Then above query will directly convert char type to int type when it gives response.
SELECT MAX(CAST (temporary_id AS Integer)) FROM temporary
WHERE temporary_id IS NOT NULL
As per my requirement I've applied MAX() aggregate function. One can remove that also and it will work the same way.
Please help me because I have been unable to get this right.
What is the access SQL to select this column(columnA) so that it returns a resultset with distinct values sorted first according to numbers and then to letters.
Here is the columns values: {10A,9C,12D,11G,9B,10C,9R,8T}
I have tried 'Select distinct ColumnA from tblClass order by 1'
but it returns {10A,10C,11G,12D,8T,9B,9C,9R} which is not what I want.
Thank you in advance.
You can use the Val() function for this. From the help topic: "The Val function stops reading the string at the first character it can't recognize as part of a number"
Val(10A) will give you 10, Val(9C) will give you 9, and so on. So in your query, order by Val(ColumnA) first, then ColumnA.
SELECT DISTINCT Val([ColumnA]) AS number_part, ColumnA
FROM tblClass
ORDER BY Val([ColumnA]), ColumnA;
SELECT DISTINCT ColumnA
FROM tblClass
ORDER BY CInt(LEFT(ColumnA,len(ColumnA)-1)), RIGHT(ColumnA,1);
If there last character is a letter and the others are a number.
Your data type is a string so it's sorting correctly, to get the result you want you're going to have to split your values into numeric and alphabetic parts and then sort first on the numeric then the alphabetic. Not being an Access programmer I can't help you with exactly how you're going to do that.
order by 1?
Don't you mean order by ColumnA?
SELECT DISTINCT ColumnA
FROM tblClass
ORDER BY ColumnA
I had a similar problem and used a dummie workaround:
changing a list of {10A,10C,11G,12D,8T,9B,9C,9R}
into {10A,10C,11G,12D,08T,09B,09C,09R} by adding the 0 before each <10 number.
now all items are the same length and access will sort correctly into {08T, 09B, 09C, 09R, 10A, 10C, 11G, 12D}
.
To achieve this, I copied this column into excel column A and used IF(LEN(A2)<3, concatenate("0", A2))
I need to order a select query using a varchar column, using numerical and text order. The query will be done in a java program, using jdbc over postgresql.
If I use ORDER BY in the select clause I obtain:
1
11
2
abc
However, I need to obtain:
1
2
11
abc
The problem is that the column can also contain text.
This question is similar (but targeted for SQL Server):
How do I sort a VARCHAR column in SQL server that contains words and numbers?
However, the solution proposed did not work with PostgreSQL.
Thanks in advance, regards,
I had the same problem and the following code solves it:
SELECT ...
FROM table
order by
CASE WHEN column < 'A'
THEN lpad(column, size, '0')
ELSE column
END;
The size var is the length of the varchar column, e.g 255 for varying(255).
You can use regular expression to do this kind of thing:
select THECOL from ...
order by
case
when substring(THECOL from '^\d+$') is null then 9999
else cast(THECOL as integer)
end,
THECOL
First you use regular expression to detect whether the content of the column is a number or not. In this case I use '^\d+$' but you can modify it to suit the situation.
If the regexp doesn't match, return a big number so this row will fall to the bottom of the order.
If the regexp matches, convert the string to number and then sort on that.
After this, sort regularly with the column.
I'm not aware of any database having a "natural sort", like some know to exist in PHP. All I've found is various functions:
Natural order sort in Postgres
Comment in the PostgreSQL ORDER BY documentation