Question

I have a table with 4 records:

NAME    INSTRUMENT    BOOLEAN 1  BOOLEAN 2
Bob     Organ         TRUE       FALSE
Thomas  Violin        FALSE      FALSE
Bob     Piano         FALSE      TRUE

I want to merge records with same “NAME”, in order to get :

Bob     Organ Piano   TRUE       TRUE
Thomas  Violin        FALSE      FALSE

What’s the rule that I want when merging ?

• “text fields” are just concatenated (example : Organ + Piano ==> “Organ Piano”)

• “boolean fields” are merged with a LOGICAL OR (example : TRUE or FALSE = TRUE)

My questions :

1) I will choose which software to use in regard to the ability to do this! Database with SQL queries (SQLite, MySQL or even Access) or Excel ?

2) If the best solution is a database, what’s the SQL query to do that ?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

My choes and SQLServer2005+

SELECT a.NAME AS NAME,(
SELECT ISNULL(b.INSTRUMENT, '')+ ' '
FROM dbo.COExample b WHERE b.NAME=a.NAME
FOR XML PATH('')) AS INSTRUMENT, MAX(CAST(BOOLEAN1 AS int)) AS BOOLEAN1, MAX(CAST(BOOLEAN2 AS int)) AS BOOLEAN2
FROM dbo.COExample a
GROUP BY a.NAME

Example on SQLFiddle