Question

I’m using SQL Azure with asp script, and for the life of me, have had no luck trying to get this to work. The table I’m running a query on has many columns, but I want to query for distinct values on 2 columns (name and email), from there I want it to return the entire row’s values.

What my query looks like now:

SELECT DISTINCT quote_contact, quote_con_email 
FROM quote_headers 
WHERE quote_contact LIKE '"&query&"%'

But I need it to return the whole row so I can retrieve other data points. Had I been smart a year ago, I would have created a separate table just for the contacts, but that’s a year ago.

And before I implemented LiveSearch features.

Answer 1

One approach would be to use a CTE (Common Table Expression). With this CTE, you can partition your data by some criteria – i.e. your quote_contact and quote_con_email – and have SQL Server number all your rows starting at 1 for each of those partitions, ordered by some other criteria – i.e. probably SomeDateTimeStamp.

So try something like this:

;WITH DistinctContacts AS
(
   SELECT 
       quote_contact, quote_con_email, (other columns here),
       RN = ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY quote_contact, quote_con_email ORDER BY SomeDateTimeStamp DESC) 
   FROM 
       dbo.quote_headers
   WHERE
       quote_contact LIKE '"&query&"%'
)
SELECT 
   quote_contact, quote_con_email, (other columns here)
FROM 
   DistinctContacts
WHERE
   RowNum = 1

Here, I am selecting only the last entry for each “partition” (i.e. for each pair of name/email) – ordered in a descending fashion by the time stamp.

Does that approach what you’re looking for??