Question

I have a fairly simple requirement -I have a table with the following (relevant) structure.

with cte as(
select 1 id,'AA,AB,AC,AD' names union all
select 2,'BA,BB' union all
select 3,'CA,CB,CC,CD,CE' union all
select 4,'DA,DB,DC'
)

i would like to create a select statement which will split each “names” column into multiple rows.

For example the first row should produce

1,'AA'
1,'AB'
1,'AC'
1,'AD'

Can we do it using only SQL. This is failry easy to do in Oracle.

Answer 1

You can do it in one query with no custom defined functions if you leverage XML:

WITH cte AS( /*your data*/
    SELECT 1 id,'AA,AB,AC,AD' names UNION ALL
    SELECT 2,'BA,BB' UNION ALL
    SELECT 3,'CA,CB,CC,CD,CE' UNION ALL
    SELECT 4,'DA,DB,DC'
)
, xmlData AS ( /*make into xml*/
    SELECT id, cast('<root><x>'+replace(names,',','</x><x>')+'</x></root>' as xml) AS theXML
    FROM cte
)
SELECT id, x.value('.','varchar(100)')  /*split up*/
FROM xmlData
CROSS APPLY  xmlData.theXML.nodes('//x') AS func(x)