I was stuck with a problem at work where I had a very complex query pulling data out of some tables, some XML and what not, and a lot of data manipulating in the query to be able to easier populate a DataWarehouse.
I then had to expand this query and pull some extra Boolean information out, which were based on a logical comparison of two strings, which I would normal do with a CASE like CASE string1 = string2 THEN 1.
However because I had a GROUP BY clause, I could not simply do this, because the columns the strings were taken from was not in the group clause and I didn’t want them there.
So I found out that you can actually put an aggregated function around the case using the following syntax:
SELECT
<GroupByFields>,
MAX(
CASE
WHEN <NonGroupField> = ‘some value’ THEN 1
ELSE 0
END
)
FROM <TABLE>
GROUP BY <GroupByFields>
This saved me from using a common table expression or two more, and kept things simple. In essense this allows you to make conditional SUM and similar using this technique.
Just more evidence that a lot is possible in SQL, and just trying something often reveals interesting results.
