Goal is to replace a integer value that is returned in a SQL query with the char value that the number represents. For example:
A table attribute labeled ‘Sport’ is defined as a integer value between 1-4. 1 = Basketball, 2 = Hockey, etc. Below is the database table and then the desired output.
Database Table:
Player Team Sport
--------------------------
Bob Blue 1
Roy Red 3
Sarah Pink 4
Desired Outputs:
Player Team Sport
------------------------------
Bob Blue Basketball
Roy Red Soccer
Sarah Pink Kickball
What is best practice to translate these integer values for String values? Use SQL to translate the values prior to passing to program? Use scripting language to change the value within the program? Change database design?
The database should hold the values and you should perform a join to another table which has that data in it.
So you should have a table which has say a list of people
ID Name FavSport
1 Alex 4
2 Gnats 2
And then another table which has a list of the sports
ID Sport
1 Basketball
2 Football
3 Soccer
4 Kickball
Then you would do a join between these tables
select people.name, sports.sport
from people, sports
where people.favsport = sports.ID
which would give you back
Name Sport
Alex Kickball
Gnat Football
You could also use a case statement eg. just using the people table from above you could write something like
select name,
case
when favsport = 1 then 'Basketball'
when favsport = 2 then 'Football'
when favsport = 3 then 'Soccer'
else 'Kickball'
end as "Sport"
from people
But that is certainly not best practice.
MySQL has a CASE statement. The following works in SQL Server:
SELECT
CASE MyColumnName
WHEN 1 THEN 'First'
WHEN 2 THEN 'Second'
WHEN 3 THEN 'Third'
ELSE 'Other'
END
In oracle you can use the DECODE function which would provide a solution where the design of the database is beyond your control.
Directly from the oracle documentation:
Example: This example decodes the value warehouse_id. If warehouse_id is 1, then the function returns 'Southlake'; if warehouse_id is 2, then it returns 'San Francisco'; and so forth. If warehouse_id is not 1, 2, 3, or 4, then the function returns 'Non domestic'.
SELECT product_id,
DECODE (warehouse_id, 1, 'Southlake',
2, 'San Francisco',
3, 'New Jersey',
4, 'Seattle',
'Non domestic') "Location"
FROM inventories
WHERE product_id < 1775
ORDER BY product_id, "Location";
The CASE expression could help. However, it may be even faster to have a small table with an int primary key and a name string such as
1 baseball
2 football
etc, and JOIN it appropriately in the query.
Do you think it would be helpful to store these relationships between integers and strings in the database itself? As long as you have to store these relationships, it makes sense to store it close to your data (in the database) instead of in your code where it can get lost. If you use this solution, this would make the integer a foreign key to values in another table. You store integers in another table, say sports, with sport_id and sport, and join them as part of your query.
Instead of SELECT * FROM my_table you would SELECT * from my_table and use the appropriate join. If not every row in your main column has a corresponding sport, you could use a left join, otherwise selecting from both tables and using = in the where clause is probably sufficient.
definitely have the DB hold the string values. I am not a DB expert by any means, but I would recommend that you create a table that holds the strings and their corresponding integer values. From there, you can define a relationship between the two tables and then do a JOIN in the select to pull the string version of the integer.
tblSport Columns
------------
SportID int (PK, eg. 12)
SportName varchar (eg. "Tennis")
tblFriend Columns
------------
FriendID int (PK)
FriendName (eg. "Joe")
LikesSportID (eg. 12)
In this example, you can get the following result from the query below:
SELECT FriendName, SportName
FROM tblFriend
INNER JOIN tblSport
ON tblFriend.LikesSportID = tblSport.SportID
Man, it's late - I hope I got that right. by the way, you should read up on the different types of Joins - this is the simplest example of one.
Related
Sorry for the bad title, I couldn't think of anything better. Feel free to edit.
I have to work with a db table that uses one column to store different types of information (last name if person, company name if company). A nightmare, I know, but it's what it is.
To distinguish the meaning, there is another column with an integer that specifies the type of what's in the name column.
The schema of this table looks as follows (simplified):
ID int
dtype int
name varchar(50)
So, a sample could look like this:
ID dtype name
---------------------------
1 0 Smith
2 0 Trump
3 1 ABC Ltd.
4 1 XYZ Ltd.
I'm trying to normalize this using the following T-SQL code:
WITH companies AS
(
SELECT ID, name AS company
FROM nametable WHERE dtype=1
),
people AS
(
SELECT ID, name AS person
FROM nametable WHERE dtype=0
),
SELECT * FROM companies UNION ALL SELECT * FROM people;
What I hoped to get is a new table with the schema:
ID
dtype
company
person
Or, in table view:
ID dtype person company
------------------------------------------
1 0 Smith
2 0 Trump
3 1 ABC Ltd.
4 1 XYZ Ltd.
Instead, the field is now just called person instead of name but it's still just one field for 2 types of information.
I understand I could just create a new table and insert each partial result into it but it seems there should be a simpler way. Any advice appreciated.
It seems you need case when which helps you
select ID, dtype,case when dtype=0 then name end AS company,
case when dtype=1 then name end AS person
FROM nametable
The CASE statement goes through conditions and return a value when condition is met, from your sample input and output its clear you want to create type wise new column ,so i used case Statement
You don't need to use UNION for this at all. A better approach would be using a bit of aggregation.
SELECT ID,
MAX(CASE WHEN dtype = 0 THEN [name] END) AS company
MAX(CASE WHEN dtype = 1 THEN [name] END) AS person
FROM nametable
GROUP BY ID;
UNION (ALL) doesn't "care" for aliases though. It combines the datasets it receives into 1. All the datasets must have the same definition and the dataset returned will have the same definition. If the datasets have different aliases for columns, the aliases supplied in the first dataset will be used. UNION doesn't detect that the datasets have different names for the columns and therefore return the different names as different columns; that's not what a UNION does.
Edit: well this will give the OP the data they want, however, there's no need for the aggregation. I was honestly expected ID's to be a shared resource; because that's normally the only time you have such horrid tables. The fact that it isn't just makes this table even more confused...
this question was probably asked somewhere but I can't seem to phrase it correctly in the search to find an accurate answer.
I'm doing a query on a Postgres DB, it has quite a few joins, the results are something like this:
WON | name | item
1 Joe A
1 Joe B
2 Smith A
So one row for each entry, I need to somehow get the result back as such:
WON | name | item
1 Joe A, B
2 Smith A
This can be done in the query or with NodeJS, there are hundreds to thousands of results for the query, so getting a distinct row (WON 1) then searching the DB for all entries that match it then repeating for the rest isn't feasible, so this may be better done in Node / Javascript, but I'm somewhat new to that, what would be a (somewhat) efficient way to do this?
If there IS a way to do this in the query itself then that would be my preference though.
Thanks
A sql approach:
SELECT won, name
,STRING_AGG(item, ',' ORDER BY item) AS items
FROM myTable
GROUP BY won, name
ORDER BY won, name
You can use GROUP BY and string_agg to cancat rows, somelike this:
Create table:
CREATE TABLE test
(
won int,
name character varying(255),
item character varying(255)
);
insert into test (won, name, item) values (1,'Joe', 'A'),(1, 'Joe', 'B'),(2, 'Smith', 'A')
And do this in the query:
select won, name, string_agg(item, ',') from test group by won, name order by won
See this example in sqlFiddle
for example :
I have a table with student ID and student grades
-----------------------
ID | grades
-----------------------
1 | 80
2 | 28
-----------------------
I want to get 0 when I query about ID = 3
can I do that ?
like select grades from student where id = 3 .
I want to get 0 because ID is not in the table
Run a select command with the reserved function called count:
select count(*) from STUDENT.GRADES where ID=3
It should be just like that.
Maybe this will do what you want:
SELECT ID, MAX(Grades)
FROM (SELECT ID, Grade FROM Students WHERE ID = 3
UNION
VALUES (3, 0) -- Not certain of syntax here
)
GROUP BY ID
The basic idea is that students present in the table will have two rows and the MAX will pick their proper grade (assuming that there are no circumstances where the grade is coded as a negative value). Students that are not represented will have just the one row with a grade of 0. The repeated 3 is the ID of the student being sought.
Have fun chasing down the full syntax. I started at Queries in the DB2 9.7 Information Centre, but ran out of patience before I got a good answer — and I don't have DB2 to experiment on. You might need to write SELECT ID, Grades FROM VALUES (3, 0), or there might be some other magical incantation that does the job. You could probably use SELECT 3 AS ID, 0 AS Grades FROM SYSIBM.SYSTABLES WHERE TABID = 1, but that's a clumsy expression.
I've kept with the column name Grades (plural) even though it looks like it contains one grade. It is depressing how often people ask questions about anonymous tables.
I am using sql server 2008.i have one table which contains two columns.one is movie name and other one is rating.my table structure like that:
MovieName | Rating
ABC | 3
XYZ | 2
DEF | 1
i used following statement to display my table records.
Select * from tablename
what i want means instead of display the rating as numbers it should display, good for rating 3,better for rating 2 and worst for rating 1.
i.e)
i want like this
MovieName | Rating
ABC | Good
XYZ | Better
DEF | Worst
can anyone tell me how to display like this using sql statement??
SELECT MovieName,
CASE WHEN Rating = 1 THEN 'Worst'
CASE WHEN Rating = 2 THEN 'Better'
CASE WHEN Rating = 3 THEN 'Good' END AS Rating
FROM tablename
The better solution would be to have one more table with the ratings and join the 2 tables to display the result:
SELECT a.MovieName, b.Description AS Rating
FROM movies a JOIN ratings b on a.Rating = b.Rating
You can use CASE to map on the fly:
SELECT MovieName,
CASE Rating
WHEN 3 then 'Good'
WHEN 2 then 'Better'
WHEN 1 then 'Worst'
END AS Rating
FROM TableName
Preferably however, you should make use of a Lookup table and then the Rating column of TableName can be foreign keyed and then joined to this table to retrieve the Rating. This will have the benefit of enforcing referential integrity, and will also allow the rating names to be changed (or made e.g. cross language friendly) without hard coding into the code.
Well, in case you have just these 3 ratings, a fast and simple solution would be:
SELECT MovieName,
CASE rating
WHEN 3 then 'Good'
WHEN 2 then 'Better'
WHEN 1 THEN 'Worst'
from table
But if you intend to create more ratings I recommend creating another table (lookup table) which holds the rating names.
Ratings
Rating RatingName
1 Worst
2 Better
3 Good
4 Supercool
When you have this set up, you could do this operation much easier.
SELECT m.MovieName, r.RatingName
FROM movies m join ratings r on m.rating = r.rating
This will allow you to insert more rating "types" and you won't have to change the query (my first query) and add case situations for the aditional ratings. After adding more rating types and movies with other ratings, they will appear automatically in your results.
What the simplest way to sub-query a variable number of rows into fields of the parent query?
PeopleTBL
NameID int - unique
Name varchar
Data: 1,joe
2,frank
3,sam
HobbyTBL
HobbyID int - unique
HobbyName varchar
Data: 1,skiing
2,swimming
HobbiesTBL
NameID int
HobbyID int
Data: 1,1
2,1
2,2
The app defines 0-2 Hobbies per NameID.
What the simplest way to query the Hobbies into fields retrieved with "Select * from PeopleTBL"
Result desired based on above data:
NameID Name Hobby1 Hobby2
1 joe skiing
2 frank skiing swimming
3 sam
I'm not sure if I understand correctly, but if you want to fetch all the hobbies for a person in one row, the following query might be useful (MySQL):
SELECT NameID, Name, GROUP_CONCAT(HobbyName) AS Hobbies
FROM PeopleTBL
JOIN HobbiesTBL USING NameID
JOIN HobbyTBL USING HobbyID
Hobbies column will contain all hobbies of a person separated by ,.
See documentation for GROUP_CONCAT for details.
I don't know what engine are you using, so I've provided an example with MySQL (I don't know what other sql engines support this).
Select P.NameId, P.Name
, Min( Case When H2.HobbyId = 1 Then H.HobbyName End ) As Hobby1
, Min( Case When H2.HobbyId = 2 Then H.HobbyName End ) As Hobby2
From HobbyTbl As H
Join HobbiesTbl As H2
On H2.HobbyId = H.HobbyId
Join PeopleTbl As P
On P.NameId = H2.NameId
Group By P.NameId, P.Name
What you are seeking is called a crosstab query. As long as the columns are static, you can use the above solution. However, if you want to dynamic build the columns, you need to build the SQL statement in middle-tier code or use a reporting tool.