Question

Hi all i have the following script which is all fine and dandy and does the job, however i don’t think it is very nice or efficient. Just wondering if there’s a better and more efficient way of doing the same? The job is to calculate the number of occurrences of numbers in a number string and then select the total. So for example with the number ‘014812000’, the expected outcome should be 6 as we have 4 x 0 occurrences and 2 x 1 occurrences. We are only concerned with occurrences over 1. Just to add this is being using in a user defined function.

DECLARE @Number nvarchar(50)
SET @Number = '014812000'

DECLARE @count0 int
DECLARE @count1 int
DECLARE @count2 int
DECLARE @count3 int
DECLARE @count4 int
DECLARE @count5 int
DECLARE @count6 int
DECLARE @count7 int
DECLARE @count8 int
DECLARE @count9 int

DECLARE @countTotal int
SET @countTotal = 0

SET @count0 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '0', '')) 
SET @count1 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '1', '')) 
SET @count2 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '2', '')) 
SET @count3 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '3', '')) 
SET @count4 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '4', '')) 
SET @count5 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '5', '')) 
SET @count6 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '6', '')) 
SET @count7 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '7', '')) 
SET @count8 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '8', '')) 
SET @count9 = LEN(@Number) - LEN(REPLACE(@Number, '9', '')) 

IF @count0 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count0
    END
IF @count1 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count1
    END
IF @count2 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count2
    END
IF @count3 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count3
    END
IF @count4 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count4
    END
IF @count5 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count5
    END
IF @count6 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count6
    END
IF @count7 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count7
    END
IF @count8 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count8
    END
IF @count9 > 1
    BEGIN
        SET @countTotal = @countTotal + @count9
    END

SELECT @countTotal

Answer 1

You can use a number table to split the number to rows. Here I use master..spt_values.

select sum(C)
from (
       select count(*) as C
       from master..spt_values as N
       where N.type = 'P' and
             N.number between 1 and len(@Number)
       group by substring(@Number, N.Number, 1)
       having count(*) > 1
     ) as T