Question

I have data such as this:

Inventors column in my table

Hundley; Edward; Ana
Isler; Hunsberger
Hunsberger;Hundley

Names are separated by ;. I want to write a SQL query which sums up the count.

Eg. The result should be:

Hundley     2
Isler       1
Hunsberger  2
Edward      1
Ana         1

I could do a group by but this is not a simple group by as you can see. Any ideas/thoughts on how to get this output?

Edit: Changed results so it doesn’t create any confusion that a row only contains 2 names.

Answer 1

You can take a look at this. I certainly do not recommend this way if you have lots of data, BUT you can do some modifications and use it and it works like a charm!

This is the new code for supporting unlimited splits:

Declare @Table  Table   (
    Name    Nvarchar(50)
);

Insert  @Table  (
    Name
)   Select  'Hundley; Edward; Anna'
Union   Select  'Isler; Hunsberger'
Union   Select  'Hunsberger; Hundley'
Union   Select  'Anna'
;

With    Result  (
    Part
,   Remained
,   [Index]
,   Level
)   As  (
    Select  Case    When    CharIndex(';', Name, 1) =   0
            Then    Name
            Else    Left(Name, CharIndex(';', Name, 1) - 1)
        End
    ,   Right(Name, Len(Name) - CharIndex(';', Name, 1))
    ,   CharIndex(';', Name, 1)
    ,   1
        From    @Table
Union   All
    Select  LTrim(
        Case    When    CharIndex(';', Remained, 1) =   0
            Then    Remained
            Else    Left(Remained, CharIndex(';', Remained, 1) - 1)
        End
    )
    ,   Right(Remained, Len(Remained) - CharIndex(';', Remained, 1))
    ,   CharIndex(';', Remained, 1)
    ,   Level
    +   1
        From    Result
        Where   [Index] <>  0
)   Select  Part
    ,   Count(*)
        From    Result
        Group   By  Part

Cheers