Question

I have two tables. One table A has n rows of data and the other table B is empty. I want to insert n rows into table B, 1 row for each row in table A. Table B will have a couple of fields from table A in it, including a foreign key from table A.

In the end I want one row in B for each row in A. To do this I used:

INSERT INTO B(Col1
             ,Col2
             ,Col3
             ,Col4
             ,Col5
             );
SELECT 100
      ,25 
      ,'ABC'
      ,1
      ,A.ID
FROM Auctions A

Now, I’ve put this code in a stored procedure and this SP takes an int param called NumInserts.

I want to insert n * NumInserts rows. So, if n is 10 and NumInserts is 5 I want to run this code 5 * 10 (50) times.

In other words for each row in table A I want to insert 5 rows in table B. How would I do that?

Answer 1

create procedure insert_into_b
    @numInserts int
as
begin
    while @numInserts > 0
    begin
        insert into b (id)
        select id from a
        set @numInserts = @numInserts - 1
    end
end

exec insert_into_b 2