Question

I have a table with several rows, and several columns. It looks like this:

Name    Description
X         PASS
X         PASS
X         FAIL

I want it to return only one row. If all of them are PASS, return PASS.
If one or more of them are FAIL, then return FAIL.

What’s the best way to go about achieving this in SQL Server 2008?

EDIT: The values in the name column will always be the same.

Answer 1

Depending on the database indexes, and assuming you want one row returned per unique name, I would look at the performance of

select 
  name, 
  min([description]) as description
from 
    tableA
group by
name

compared to the other solutions