Question

I know the datepart is returned as an int. The string lives in WeeklyFreq column with nvarchar data type in the Alerts table.

I’ve tried every variation of cast and convert, but to no avail. The Google has let me down as well.

I’m missing something that must be very obvious here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

SELECT *
FROM Alerts
WHERE DATEPART(dw, GETDATE()) IN 
(SELECT WeeklyFreq
FROM Alerts
WHERE Id = 1)

Thank you both very much for your input. The solution seems to be:

SELECT     *
FROM         Alerts
WHERE     ((SELECT     WeeklyFreq
FROM         Alerts
WHERE     Id = 1) LIKE 
N'%' + CAST(DATEPART(dw, GETDATE()) AS  nvarchar(2)) + N'%')

I agree that storing the data in separate columns rather than in a string would be the proper solution, but circumstances don’t allow for that at this juncture.

How do I accept both of your answers as the best choice?

The big picture looks like this:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_QueueOrdersWeeklyBetween] AS
DECLARE @Id int
DECLARE @VendorId int
DECLARE @SurveyId int
DECLARE @DealerId int
DECLARE @ItemId int
DECLARE @Email nvarchar(255)
DECLARE Transaction_Cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT     Orders.Id, Orders.VendorId, Orders.SurveyId, Orders.DealerId,  Orders.ItemId, Retailers.Email
FROM         Orders INNER JOIN
                  Retailers ON Retailers.DealerId = Orders.DealerId INNER JOIN
                  Alerts ON Alerts.VendorId = Orders.VendorId
WHERE     (Orders.Queued = 0) AND (Orders.SurveyQueued = 0) AND (Alerts.Occurs = 3) AND (DATEPART(hh, GETDATE()) BETWEEN 
                  Alerts.WeeklyDailyFreqEveryStart AND Alerts.WeeklyDailyFreqEveryEnd - 1) AND (Alerts.Alert1 = 1) AND (Alerts.WeeklyDailyFreq = 2) AND 
                  (Alerts.WeeklyFreq LIKE N'%' + CAST(DATEPART(dw, GETDATE()) AS nvarchar(2)) + N'%')
OPEN Transaction_Cursor
FETCH NEXT FROM Transaction_Cursor
INTO @Id, @VendorId, @SurveyId, @DealerId, @ItemId, @Email
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
INSERT INTO MailQueue (OrderId, VendorId, SurveyId, DealerId, ItemId, MailedTo, WhenQueued) 
VALUES (@Id, @VendorId, @SurveyId, @DealerId, @ItemId, @Email, GetDate())
UPDATE Orders SET Queued = 1 WHERE ID = @Id
FETCH NEXT FROM Transaction_Cursor
INTO @Id, @VendorId, @SurveyId, @DealerId, @ItemId, @Email
END
CLOSE Transaction_Cursor
DEALLOCATE Transaction_Cursor
GO

Answer 1

This is not how the IN operator works, see msdn. You say that weeklyfreq is of type nvarchar, so this seems to contain a comma-separated list of the values you want to check against. Otherwise I couldn’t see a reason why you’d limit the subquery to a single row. For the IN operator to work the column would have to be of type int as well.

What could work in this case:

SELECT * FROM Alerts
  WHERE N'%' + cast(DATEPART(dw, GETDATE()) as nvarchar(2)) + N'%' LIKE 
  (SELECT weeklyfreq FROM Alerts WHERE Id = 1)

This assumes that weeklyfreq contains a series of one-digit numbers. Also, this will only work as long as the subquery returns only a single row. The current day of week is converted to varchar and enclosed in ‘%’ to make the LIKE operator work.

But I would not recommend to use this; if you can, store your data in a different way that allows for easier analysis.

Also, I can’t quite see where exactly you’re going with this. For this to make any sense, the Alerts table of the outer select should be either referenced in the WHERE clause or within the subquery (that would then be a correlated subquery).

The only thing I can see that’d make sense is to lose the subquery, then it’d be

SELECT * FROM Alerts
  WHERE weeklyfreq LIKE N'%' + cast(DATEPART(dw, GETDATE()) as nvarchar(2)) + N'%'

This you can additionally filter for an user’s ID by adding to the WHERE clause.