Question

I have a query which returns to me results as follows:

  Race   | Candidate | Total Votes | MaxNoOfWinners
    ---------------------------------------------------
    1      | 1         | 5000        | 3
    1      | 2         | 6700        | 3
    2      | 1         | 100         | 3
    2      | 2         | 200         | 3
    2      | 3         | 300         | 3
    2      | 4         | 400         | 3
    ...

I was wondering if there was a query that could be written to return only the winners (based on the MaxNoOfWinners and TotalVotes) for a certain race. So for the above i would only get back

Race   | Candidate | Total Votes | MaxNoOfWinners
---------------------------------------------------
1      | 1         | 5000        | 3
1      | 2         | 6700        | 3
2      | 2         | 200         | 3
2      | 3         | 300         | 3
2      | 4         | 400         | 3
...

Answer 1

Here is a solution… I did not test so there may be typos. The idea is is use the RANK() function of SQL Server to give a ranking by Race based on votes and not include those that don’t meet the criteria. Note, using RANK() and not ROW_NUMBER() will include ties in the result.

WITH RankedResult AS
(
  SELECT Race, Candidate, [Total Votes], MaxNoOfWinners, RANK ( )  OVER (PARTITION BY Race ORDER BY [Total Votes] DESC) AS aRank
  FROM Results
)
SELECT Race, Candidate, [Total Votes], MaxNoOfWinners
FROM RankedResult
WHERE aRANK <= MaxNumberOfWinners