Question

I have a many-to-many relationship between a list of codes and a main table with information pertinent to people on it. There are several different codes with different text values that are all variations of the same thing. I want to check if ANY of them are present. My method of doing this is going to be using LIKE%what i'm looking for%. I want to update a binary value in my main table based on the fact that a certain string is present in one of my other tables.

Here’s the query insofar as I can solve it without messing anything up.

UPDATE tblVisits
SET variableOfInterest=1
FROM tblVisits INNER JOIN
icd_jxn ON tblVisits.kha_id = icd_jxn.kha_id INNER JOIN
tblICD on icd_jxn.icd_fk=tblICD.ICD_ID
WHERE (tblICD.Descrip LIKE N'%text of interest%')

Since there are so many different codes that share the common attribute of having a certain string of text in their descriptions, I felt like this would be the best way to go about it instead of using a ton of OR statements. This is an older schema before I decided to add my ‘variableofInterest’ in tblVisits.

Answer 1

You could rewrite it with EXISTS:

UPDATE tblVisits
SET variableOfInterest = 1
FROM tblVisits 
WHERE EXISTS
      ( SELECT *
        FROM icd_jxn 
          INNER JOIN tblICD 
            ON icd_jxn.icd_fk = tblICD.ICD_ID
        WHERE tblICD.Descrip LIKE N'%text of interest%'
          AND tblVisits.kha_id = icd_jxn.kha_id
      )