Question

I’ve been struggling with this one SQL query requirement today that I was wondering if someone could help me with.

I have a table of sports questions. One of the columns is the team related to the question. My requirement is to return a set number of random questions where the teams are unique.

So lets say we have the following table and want 5 questions:

Question        Answer        Team ----------------------------------- question 1      answer 1      team A question 2      answer 2      team B question 3      answer 3      team B question 4      answer 3      team D question 5      answer 3      team A question 6      answer 3      team C question 7      answer 3      team F question 8      answer 3      team C question 9      answer 3      team G question 10     answer 3      team D 

A valid result would return:

question 1      answer 1      team A question 2      answer 2      team B question 4      answer 3      team D question 6      answer 3      team C question 7      answer 3      team F 

I feel that it should be possible to accomplish this as a clean SQL statement with some clever use of Distinct and Take but I haven’t been able to get it right yet.

Best solution so far is from Mladen Prajdic. I have just updated it slightly to improve on it’s randomness:

SELECT TOP 10 *  FROM    (SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY Team ORDER BY Team, NEWID()) AS RN, *     FROM Question     ) teams WHERE   RN = 2 ORDER BY NEWID() 

Answer 1

for sql 2005 you can do this:

select top 5 *  from    (             select ROW_NUMBER() over(partition by team order by team) as RN, *             from @t          ) t where RN = 1 order by NEWID()