Question

Output grid-like table from many unlinked tables

Asked by: dprovencher

Hi, I've been searching and thinking of a way to do this all day yesterday and I'm about to give up and do it in C#.  But before I do I'd really like to know if anyone can think of a way to do this in SQL.  What I want to do is make a query that returns rows based on other tables.  That's not clear, let's say I've got the following tables:

tbl1
a b c
d e f
g h i

tbl2
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
0 1 2

What I want is to get something like this:

a b c 1 2 3
d e f 4 5 6
g h i 7 8 9
NULL NULL NULL 0 1 2

I don't want to use the CREATE TABLE by the way, I hate the idea of temp tables, they should never be used :)

Thanks for any input!

I use SQL Server 2000.

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Asked On
2009-01-23 at 06:17:38ID24077510
Tags

SQL

,

SQL 2000

,

T-SQL

Topics

MS SQL Server

,

SQL Query Syntax

,

SQL Server 2005

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: JCinDEPosted on 2009-01-23 at 06:37:06ID: 23449211

You generally need to have some sort of key to identify which row in tbl1 goes with which row in tbl2. (Unless you're looking for a matrix of the two, which is pretty simple to get with just "select * from tbl1, tbl2" but I don't get the sense that's what you want.)

I really need more information to go on. The question is pretty vague.

By the way: Never say never. Temp tables have their place

 

by: dprovencherPosted on 2009-01-23 at 07:09:00ID: 23449542

There is no common key in either table, the resulting records will be used in an horizontal report, that's why I need this.  Thanks for the reply :)

 

by: matthewspatrickPosted on 2009-01-23 at 07:18:25ID: 23449640

dprovencher said:
>>There is no common key in either table

That complicates things, and now I think it's time for temp tables :)



SELECT IDENTITY(int, 1, 1) AS ID, column1, column2, column3
INTO #t1
FROM tbl1

SELECT IDENTITY(int, 1, 1) AS ID, column1, column2, column3
INTO #t2
FROM tbl2

SELECT #t1.column1 AS T1C1, #t1.column2 AS T1C2, #t1.column3 AS T1C3, #t2.column1 AS T2C1,
    #t2.column2 AS T2C2 #t2.column3 AS T2C3
FROM #t1 FULL OUTER JOIN
    #t2 ON #t1.ID = #t2.ID
ORDER BY COALESCE(#t1.ID, #t2.ID)

DROP TABLE #t1
DROP TABLE #t2

 

by: dprovencherPosted on 2009-01-23 at 07:38:32ID: 23449826

Damn thanks!  All I was missing was the ORDER BY COALESCE(#t1.ID, #t2.ID) all my records were mixed up :D

I'll post my solution without temp tables and give you the points.

 

by: dprovencherPosted on 2009-01-23 at 08:04:35ID: 23450115

Here's my code, first a UDF for each table (don't know how else to do this):

CREATE FUNCTION fct_tbl_cie_identity ()
RETURNS @Table TABLE  (NoCompagnie NVARCHAR(1024), Nom NVARCHAR(1024), RowIndex INT IDENTITY) AS
BEGIN
INSERT INTO @Table
SELECT NoCompagnie, Nom FROM tbl_cie
RETURN
END

And the actual query:

SELECT *
FROM
fct_tbl_cie_identity() cie FULL OUTER JOIN
fct_tbl_contrat_identity() contrat ON cie.RowIndex = contrat.RowIndex FULL OUTER JOIN
fct_tbl_chantier_identity() chantier ON contrat.RowIndex = chantier.RowIndex FULL OUTER JOIN
fct_tbl_activite_identity() activite ON chantier.RowIndex = activite.RowIndex
ORDER BY COALESCE(cie.RowIndex, contrat.RowIndex, chantier.RowIndex, activite.RowIndex)

 

by: matthewspatrickPosted on 2009-01-23 at 08:15:42ID: 23450241

dprovencher,

Nicely done :)  I would be curious to know if there were any difference in performance when comparing our
two approaches...

Regards,

Patrick

 

by: dprovencherPosted on 2009-01-23 at 08:33:21ID: 23450450

The tables are not big enough I don't think so, but I'd rather use memory instead of the hard disk :)

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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