Order SQL query by the sum of specefic columns - sql

Question

Here is an extract from the fairly large table (SQL Server 2005) I'm querying against:
id (primary key) | account | phone | employee | address
------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | 123 | Y | Y | N
2 | 456 | N | N | N
3 | 789 | Y | Y | Y
I need to only return the rows that have at least one Y in phone, employee, or address (there are about 10 others not shown here). Then I need to order those results by the number of Y's they have in any of the three.
I've tried getting the "tagTotal" like this:
SELECT
SUM(
CASE WHEN [phone] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
+ CASE WHEN [employee] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
+ CASE WHEN [address] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
)
FROM table
GROUP BY id
this returns:
tagTotal
---------------
2
0
3
I'm at a loss on how to combine this with my existing giant query and order by it without adding each column to the group by at the end.

Answer 1

Since the sum of values you're after is on the same row, you don't need to aggregrate the results, thereby eliminating the need for the group by..
SELECT
CASE WHEN [phone] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END +
CASE WHEN [employee] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END +
CASE WHEN [address] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END as Total
FROM table

Answer 2

You can just do the addition as a column and then order the results. The aggregation seems unnecessary, at least with the sample data in the question. There is only one row per id.
SELECT t.*
FROM (SELECT t.*,
((CASE WHEN [phone] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) +
(CASE WHEN [employee] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) +
(CASE WHEN [address] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
) as NumYs
FROM table t
) t
WHERE NumYs > 0
ORDER BY NumYs DESC;

Answer 3

Try selecting the ID and ordering by the sum?
SELECT id,
SUM(
CASE WHEN [phone] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
+ CASE WHEN [employee] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
+ CASE WHEN [address] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
) as numsum
FROM table
ORDER BY numsum

Answer 4

This should work:
select *
from
(
SELECT
id,
SUM(
CASE WHEN [phone] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
+ CASE WHEN [employee] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
+ CASE WHEN [address] = 'Y' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
) tagTotal
FROM table
GROUP BY id
) x
where x.tagTotal <> 0
order by x.tagTotal desc
The inner query is basically yours, with the addition of the Id (which I assume you need) and giving the sum a name. This is then used as the input to the outer query, excluding those with a zero total and sorting with highest sum first.
(Incidentally, this is not a large query. The largest single select statement I have written covered over 250 lines, took 20 minutes to run, and did the daily P&L of a commodity trading company. That was large...)