Question

Basically I’m trying to get a distinct count within this cubed result. But unfortuantly you cannot use Count(distinct(Field)) with cube and rollup (as stated here)

Here is what the Data Looks Like. (This is just a simple example I do expect duplicates in the Data)

    Category1       Category2       ItemId
    a               b               1
    a               b               1
    a               a               1
    a               a               2
    a               c               1
    a               b               2
    a               b               3
    a               c               2
    a               a               1
    a               a               3
    a               c               4

---

Here is what I would like to do but it doesn’t work.

SELECT
  Category1,
  Category2,
  Count(Distinct(ItemId))
FROM ItemList IL
GROUP BY
  Category1,
  Category2
WITH CUBE

I know that I can do a sub select like this to get the results I want:

SELECT
  *,
  (SELECT
     Count(Distinct(ItemId)) 
   FROM ItemList IL2 
   WHERE 
     (Q1.Category1 IS NULL OR Q1.Category1 IS NOT NULL AND Q1.Category1 = IL2.Category1) 
     AND
     (Q1.Category2 IS NULL OR Q1.Category2 IS NOT NULL AND Q1.Category2 = IL2.Category2))
       AS DistinctCountOfItems 
FROM (SELECT
        Category1,
        Category2
      FROM ItemList IL
      GROUP BY
        Category1,
        Category2
      WITH CUBE) Q1

But this runs slow when the result set is large due to the sub-select. Is there any other way to get a Distinct Count from a cubed result?

This is the result I want to see

Category1     Category2    DistinctCountOfItems
a             a            3
a             b            3
a             c            3
a             NULL         4
NULL          NULL         4
NULL          a            3
NULL          b            3
NULL          c            3

Answer 1

You should be able to clean up your “messy” answer like so:

select Category1, Category2, count(distinct ItemId)
from ItemList
group by Category1, Category2
UNION ALL
select Category1, null, count(distinct ItemId)
from ItemList
group by Category1
UNION ALL
select null, Category2, count(distinct ItemId)
from ItemList
group by Category2
UNION ALL
select null, null, count(distinct ItemId)
from ItemList

Then the other option I came up with:

select IL1.Category1, IL1.Category2, count(distinct ItemId)
from ( 
  select Category1, Category2
  from ItemList
  group by Category1, Category2
  with cube
 ) IL1
 join ItemList IL2 on (IL1.Category1=IL2.Category1 and IL1.Category2=IL2.Category2)
      or (IL1.Category1 is null and IL1.Category2=IL2.Category2)
      or (IL1.Category2 is null and IL1.Category1=IL2.Category1)
      or (IL1.Category1 is null and IL1.Category2 is null)
group by IL1.Category1, IL1.Category2

The efficiency may vary based on the indexes, number of columns being grouped, etc. For the test table I wrote, the sub-select and join (as opposed to the Unions) was slightly better. I don’t have access to a MSSQL 2000 instance at the moment (I tested on a 2005 instance), but I don’t think anything here is invalid.

UPDATE

An even better option, especially if you’re grouping on more than 2 columns (If you’re grouping on 8 columns the above code would require 256 join clauses to catch all null combinations!):

select IL1.Category1, IL1.Category2, count(distinct ItemId)
from ( 
  select Category1, Category2
  from ItemList
  group by Category1, Category2
  with cube
 ) IL1
 inner join ItemList IL2 on isnull(IL1.Category1,IL2.Category1)=IL2.Category1
                  and isnull(IL1.Category2,IL2.Category2)=IL2.Category2
group by IL1.Category1, IL1.Category2