Select pair of rows that obey a rule - sql

Question

I have a big table (1M rows) with the following columns:
source, dest, distance.
Each row defines a link (from A to B).
I need to find the distances between a pair using anoter node.
An example:
If want to find the distance between A and B,
If I find a node x and have:
x -> A
x -> B
I can add these distances and have the distance beetween A and B.
My question:
How can I find all the nodes (such as x) and get their distances to (A and B)?
My purpose is to select the min value of distance.
P.s: A and B are just one connection (I need to do it for 100K connections).
Thanks !

Answer 1

As Andomar said, you'll need the Dijkstra's algorithm, here's a link to that algorithm in T-SQL: T-SQL Dijkstra's Algorithm

Answer 2

Assuming you want to get the path from A-B with many intermediate steps it is impossible to do it in plain SQL for an indefinite number of steps. Simply put, it lacks the expressive power, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power#Expressive_power_in_database_theory . As Andomar said, load the data into a process and us Djikstra's algorithm.

Answer 3

This sounds like the traveling salesman problem.
From a SQL syntax standpoint: connect by prior would build the tree your after using the start with and limit the number of layers it can traverse; however, doing will not guarantee the minimum.

Answer 4

I may get downvoted for this, but I find this an interesting problem. I wish that this could be a more open discussion, as I think I could learn a lot from this.
It seems like it should be possible to achieve this by doing multiple select statements - something like SELECT id FROM mytable WHERE source="A" ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT 1. Wrapping something like this in a while loop, and replacing "A" with an id variable, would do the trick, no?
For example (A is source, B is final destination):
DECLARE var_id as INT
WHILE var_id != 'B'
BEGIN
SELECT id INTO var_id FROM mytable WHERE source="A" ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT 1
SELECT var_id
END
Wouldn't something like this work? (The code is sloppy, but the idea seems sound.) Comments are more than welcome.

Answer 5

Join the table to itself with destination joined to source. Add the distance from the two links. Insert that as a new link with left side source, right side destination and total distance if that isn't already in the table. If that is in the table but with a shorter total distance then update the existing row with the shorter distance.
Repeat this until you get no new links added to the table and no updates with a shorter distance. Your table now contains a link for every possible combination of source and destination with the minimum distance between them. It would be interesting to see how many repetitions this would take.
This will not track the intermediate path between source and destination but only provides the shortest distance.

Answer 6

IIUC this should do, but I'm not sure if this is really viable (performance-wise) due to the big amount of rows involved and to the CROSS JOIN
SELECT
t1.src AS A,
t1.dest AS x,
t2.dest AS B,
t1.distance + t2.distance AS total_distance
FROM
big_table AS t1
CROSS JOIN
big_table AS t2 ON t1.dst = t2.src
WHERE
A = 'insert source (A) here' AND
B = 'insert destination (B) here'
ORDER BY
total_distance ASC
LIMIT
1
The above snippet will work for the case in which you have two rows in the form A->x and x->B but not for other combinations (e.g. A->x and B->x). Extending it to cover all four combiantions should be trivial (e.g. create a view that duplicates each row and swaps src and dest).