Question

I’m working with survey data where each survey has 1 or 2 rows of data, each row has a score, and row 1 has keywords. I need to SUM all the survey scores where row 1 contains a certain keyword.

I’m trying to find a non-interative way to SUM the Score across multiple rows for each unique survey that contains a certain keyword

   SURVEYGUID   ANSWER_NUMBER     SCORE  KEYWORDS
      FOO            1             3     MILK EGGS JUICE
      FOO            2            10  
      WIZ            1             1     TOAST
      WIZ            2             5
      BAR            1             5     MILK TOAST
      BAR            2             2 

IN pseudo code, it’s easy:

CALC_SCORE (txt) =
   Find all SURVEYGUIDs where Keywords contains 'txt'
   Then SUM all Scores for that list of SURVEYGUIDS

CALC_SCORE (MILK) would find surveys FOO and BAR, then SUM (3+10) + (5+2)

CALC_SCORE (TOAST) would find WIZ and BAR, then SUM (1+5) + (5+2)

Is there some kind of join or pivot that allows me to do that in a single, or maybe two SQL queries?

(My project is Rails/Activerecord fwiw)

Answer 1

SELECT SUM(Score) FROM MyTable WHERE SurveyGUID IN 
(SELECT DISTINCT SurveyGUID FROM MyTable WHERE Keywords LIKE '%MILK%')

EDIT: If you’re concerned about getting false positives (due to words like “MILKSHAKE” or “BUTTERMILK”), you could use the following technique:

SELECT SUM(Score) FROM MyTable WHERE SurveyGUID IN 
(SELECT DISTINCT SurveyGUID FROM MyTable WHERE 
    Keywords = 'MILK' OR 
    Keywords LIKE 'MILK %' OR 
    Keywords LIKE '% MILK' OR 
    Keywords LIKE '% MILK %')