Sybase SQL CASE with CAST - sql

Question

I have a Sybase table (which I can't alter) that I am trying to get into a specific table format. The table contains three columns all which are string values, with an id (which is not unique), a "position" which is a number that represents a field name, and a field column that is the value. The table looks like:
id position field
100 0 John
100 1 Jane
100 2 25
100 3 50
101 0 Dave
101 3 30
Position 0 means "SalesRep1", Position 1 means "SR1Commission", Position 2 means "SalesRep2", and Position 3 means "SR2Commission".
I am trying to get a table that looks like following, with the Commission columns being decimals instead of strings:
id SalesRep1 SR1Commission SalesRep2 SR2Commisson
100 John 25 Jane 50
101 Dave 30 NULL NULL
I've gotten close using CASE, but I end up with only one value per row and not sure there's a way to do what I want. I also have problems with trying to get CAST included to change the commission values from strings to decimals. Here's what I have so far:
SELECT id
CASE "position" WHEN '0' THEN field END AS SalesRep1,
CASE "position" WHEN '1' THEN field END AS SalesRep2,
CASE "position" WHEN '2' THEN field END AS SR1Commission,
CASE "position" WHEN '3' THEN field END AS SR2Commission
FROM v_custom_field WHERE id = ?
This gives me the following result when querying for id 100:
id SalesRep1 SR1Commission SalesRep2 SR2Commission
100 John NULL NULL NULL
100 NULL 25 NULL NULL
100 NULL NULL Jane NULL
100 NULL NULL NULL 50
This is close, but I want to 'collapse' the rows down into one row based off of the id as well as cast the commission values to numbers. I tried adding in a CAST(field AS DECIMAL) I'm not sure if this is even the right direction to go, and was looking into PIVOT, but Sybase doesn't seem to support that.

Answer 1

This is known as an entity-attribute-value table. They're a pain to work with because they're one step removed from being relational data, but they're very common for user-defined fields in applications.
If you can't use PIVOT, you'll need to do something like this:
SELECT DISTINCT s.id,
f0.field AS SalesRep1,
CAST(f1.field AS DECIMAL(20,5)) AS SR1Commission,
f2.field AS SalesRep2,
CAST(f3.field AS DECIMAL(20,5)) AS SR2Commission
FROM UnnamedSalesTable s
LEFT JOIN UnnamedSalesTable f0
ON f0.id = s.id AND f0.position = 0
LEFT JOIN UnnamedSalesTable f1
ON f1.id = s.id AND f1.position = 1
LEFT JOIN UnnamedSalesTable f2
ON f2.id = s.id AND f2.position = 2
LEFT JOIN UnnamedSalesTable f3
ON f3.id = s.id AND f3.position = 3
It's not very fast because it's a ton of self-joins followed by a DISTINCT, but it does work.