Question

I would like my MSSQL statement to return the string ‘multiple’ if multiple jobs are found. If only one job is found, I want to return the value found in job_no

SELECT     CASE WHEN COUNT(*) = 1 THEN job_no ELSE 'multiple' END AS Expr1
FROM        job_table
WHERE     (item_no LIKE '%11012%')
GROUP BY job_no

The above statement doesn’t evaluate the count(*) correctly and returns all the jobs instead of the string ‘multiple’. I believe it is because of the group statement causing it to evaluate each row separately. Without the GROUP BY statement it errors out that it needs an aggregate or group by.

Answer 1

select case when count > 1 then 'multiple' else job_no end from
(select job_no, COUNT(*) as count 
from job_table where item_no like '%11012%' group by job_no) as t

UPDATE:

Looks like I misunderstood the question. If you just need one record in the result set for all jobs this should do the trick:

select case when count(*) > 1 then 'multiple' else MAX(job_no) end 
from job_table where item_no like '%11012%'