Question

I have a table with primary keys that look like this:

FIRSTKEY~ABC

SECONDKEY~DEF

FIRSTKEY~DEF

I want to write a SELECT statement that strips off the segment following the tilde and returns all rows that are duplicates after the post-tilde segment is gone. That is,

SELECT …

Gives me:

FIRSTKEY~ABC

FIRSTKEY~DEF

As “duplicates”.

I already have the bit to strip off the end segment using SUBSTRING:

SELECT SUBSTRING(COLUMN, 0, CHARINDEX(‘~’, COLUMN)) FROM TABLE

This is on SQL Server.

Answer 1

The first solution given will identify the key prefixes; extend it just a bit to get the table rows beginning with those keys:

SELECT * 
FROM TABLE
WHERE SUBSTRING(COLUMN, 0, CHARINDEX('~', COLUMN)) IN
(
    SELECT SUBSTRING(COLUMN, 0, CHARINDEX('~', COLUMN)) FROM TABLE 
    GROUP BY SUBSTRING(COLUMN, 0, CHARINDEX('~', COLUMN))
    HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
)

Alternately, you could use a join between a temp table containing the prefixes and the original table – if the number of prefixes becomes very large, using a “where in” can become very expensive.