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vacpartswarehouseFlag for United States of America

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Better/Quicker Way to Join on LIKE in SQL Server?

Hello,

I have two sets of data I'm trying to join, but the query is so slow it times out even with very small sections of the data.

The first set of data is an email address and a comma-separated list of categories.

Email_Address	Customer_Categories
bob1@bob.com	592,593
bob2@bob.com	592,593,597
bob3@bob.com	602

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The second set of data is a list of SKUs which have one category ID associated with them on each row:

productcode	categoryid
2036814		592
2102602		593
2031181		597
2031212		597
2102602		599
2102602		602
2102602		608
2102602		610
2102602		611

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I've tried to create join the two result sets on a LIKE condition

SELECT
	CustomerTable.EmailAddress, 
	ProductTable.ProductCode
FROM 
	(SELECT EmailAddress, Customer_Categories FROM Customers) AS CustomerTable
JOIN 
	(SELECT ProductCode, CategoryID FROM Products) AS ProductTable
ON
	CustomerTable.Customer_Categories LIKE ProductTable.CategoryID

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but either there's too much data, the query is too slow, or both. Is there a better or more efficient way to do this sort of query in SQL Server?
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Avatar of ste5an
ste5an
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Have to agree with ste5an.  Your CustomerCategories column is not normalized and the Like argument in your SQL will take forever with large datasets.  Your customer Categories table should look like:

CustomerID    CategoryID
1                            592
1                            593
2                            592
2                            593
2                            597
3                            602

and you should have a Customers table which contains the CustomerID and email address, along with other customer specific fields.
Can't understand why do you have 2 sub-queries. You can use a single query for that:
SELECT
	Customers.EmailAddress, 
	Products.ProductCode
FROM Customers, Products 
WHERE Customers.Customer_Categories LIKE Products.CategoryID

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