Question

I’m trying to take transactional data and cleanse it to meet my analysis needs. There are some limitations to how transactions are recorded into the database, and I am trying to get around those limitations.

When a customer places an order with more than 1 product, the transactional database doesn’t link the multiple products together. Each product will have a unique sales ID, but there is no way to group multiple sales ID into 1 order. Here is a sample:

OrderID   MultOrderID   CustomerID  SalesDate   SalesTime   ProductID   ProductCost ShippingCost
6082346                 7661X0A     2012-06-12  959         105         99.99       7.95
6082347   5809812YY6Y   T891002     2012-06-12  1005        222         99.95       7.95
6082348   5809812YY6Z   T891002     2012-06-12  1005        273         22.95       1.00
6082349   5809812YY71   T891002     2012-06-12  1005        285         499.95      1.00
6082350   5809812YY72   T891002     2012-06-12  1005        172         49.95       1.00
6082351   5809812YY73   T891002     2012-06-12  1005        105         99.99       7.95
6082352   5809812YY74   X637251     2012-06-12  1010        285         499.95      7.95
6082353   5809812YY75   X637251     2012-06-12  1010        30          1024.99     1.00
6082354                 T512AT0     2012-06-12  1017        172         49.95       7.95

An additional limitation to this transaction system is that it can not ship more than 4 products together. If the customer places an order for 5 products, 4 products are shipped together (and charged 1 shipping charge), the remaining product is shipped separately and charged another shipping charge (yes, the overall business wants to rebuild this entire legacy system….).

What I am trying to determine is the number of products shipped per order, and the aggregate product costs and shipping costs.

If you look at the last 4 characters of the MultOrderID, you’ll see that it’s sequential, YY6Y becomes YY6Z, then rolls over to YY71, YY72. The logic is standardized – I know that if the CustomerID, SalesDate and SalesTime are the same, then I can pair off the products together. What I don’t know is HOW I can accomplish this.

I believe the way to accomplish this is to break out the orders by CustomerID, SalesDate and SalesTime. Then, I get a for-loop, or something like that to cycle through the individual entries. Then, I look for the last 4 characters of the MultOrderID and say – If 1,2 and 3 are the same, and the 4th character is after the 4th character of the previous order, then pair it together, up to 4 orders. If the orderID is the 5th to 8th order in the range, then that’s shipment 2, etc.

Can this be done in SQL Server? If not in that, what should I write this in? And is a for-loop what I should be using in this case?

Edit: Here is the output I am trying to get to. Keep in mind that after the 4th product was shipped, I need to restart the ordering (so, 6 products get broken into 2 shipments [4 products and 2 products], 9 products into 3 shipments [4, 4, and 1].

PRODUCTSSHIPPED SALESDATE   SALESTIME   CUSTOMERID  PRODUCTCOST SHIPPINGCOST
4               6/12/12         1005    T891002     672.8       10.95
1               6/12/12         1005    T891002     99.99       7.95
2               6/12/12         1010    X637251     1524.94     8.95
1               6/12/12         1017    T512AT0     49.95       7.95
1               6/12/12         959     7661X0A     99.99       7.95

Answer 1

Well from this statement it seems like you want this:

What I am trying to determine is the number of products shipped per
order, and the aggregate product costs and shipping costs.

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/e0e71/30

So I’m not sure what you mean by using a foreach loop?

UPDATE:

Got it working using a subquery and ceiling function

Updated the fiddle

FYI SQL is:

SELECT
SalesDate,
SalesTime,
CustomerID,
SUM(ProductCost),
SUM(ShippingCost)
FROM 

(
SELECT
       SalesDate,
       SalesTime,
       CustomerID,
       ProductCost,
       ShippingCost,
       ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY salesdate, salestime, customerid ORDER BY CustomerID) as ProdNumber
FROM Orders
) as Summary
group by SalesDate, SalesTime, CustomerID, ceiling(ProdNumber / 4.0)

I used ROW_NUMBER to get a running count of products for each order, then made this a subquery so I could do the grouping. The grouping just used the number of products divided by 4 (as float) and uses the ceiling function to round up to the nearest int to get it grouping into 4