Question

Is it possible to have an “IN” statement within a left join clause?
I have two tables with two columns:

Table 1:                  Table 2:

Column1:                  Column2:

192192,                   192192
119202                    119202
810395                    810395
975643,                   975643
908574,,                  908574

As you can see, tbl1.col1 has entries can have entries with commas trailing or have none at all. I need to join the two tables where column 1 contains column 2 or where they are equal. It made sense to be to join where column1 includes column 2. Maybe there’s a better way to accomplish the join?

I need to join the two to access data in table 2. So the columns just need to align while allowing for a potential comma or two in column 1. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If this is just some sort of one-time deal or a staging table and not your real prod table:
(this one works no matter where inteh number the commas are)

select <column list>
from table1 t1
join table2 t2 on replace(t1.col1, ',','') = t2.col2

or

select <column list>
from table1 t1
join table2 t2 on  cast(t2.col2 as varchar (10)) like t1.col1+'%'

(you may or may not need the cast depending onthe data types of the tow columns, I was assuming one was varchar and the other was integer)

or
(this only works if the value will always be the same length

select <column list>
from table1 t1
join table2 t2 on left(t1.col1,6) = t2.col2

If this is a real prod table, then you could have performance issues joining on a function, so fix the data instead.