Question

I am looking for a query/set of SQL queries that will give me the record ID of the record which has the “maximum number of non-empty/non-null fields”.
I was looking into count() and max() functions, but they seem to be solving problems for the same column, but not for the same row (which is what I am looking for).

Please help.

Answer 1

You could order by the amount of non-empty fields:

select  top 1 Record_ID
from    YourTable
order by
        case when isnull(col1,'') <> '' then 1 else 0 end +
        case when isnull(col2,'') <> '' then 1 else 0 end +
        case when isnull(col3,'') <> '' then 1 else 0 end +
        ...
        case when isnull(colN,'') <> '' then 1 else 0 end

This is SQL Server syntax. If you’re using another database, please amend your question.