Question

I have a table customer and 100 rows in it. a status column is set for active/inactive customer in the table.

What i want to do is to select all customers from the table in a specific order
ie

first 7 active customers then 3 inactive customers again 7 active customers and 3 inactive and so on

How can I achieve this in a query.

I am using sql server 2008 . Please Help me….

Answer 1

Something like this should do it, based on the minimal requirements you’ve listed so far:

;with NumberedRows as (
    select
        *, --TODO - pick columns
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY status ORDER BY PKID) - 1 as rn
    from
        table
), AlteredOrdering as (
    select
        *, --TODO - pick columns
        CASE
            WHEN status = 'active' THEN (10 * (rn/7)) + (rn % 7)
            WHEN status = 'inactive' THEN (10 * (rn/3)) + 7 + (rn % 3)
        END as FinalOrder
    from NumberedRows
)
select * from AlteredOrdering ORDER BY FinalOrder

Obviously, altering the table and column names as appropriate. PKID is assumed to be some other column in the table against which the individual rows can be ordered.

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The magic numbers in the AlteredOrdering CTE are hopefully obvious – 7 and 3 come from the question, and represent how many of each item should appear in each “group”. The 10 is the total size of each “group”. So if it was 9 active, 4 inactive, the CASE expression would look like:

WHEN status = 'active' THEN (13 * (rn/9)) + (rn % 9)
WHEN status = 'inactive' THEN (13 * (rn/4)) + 9 + (rn % 4)