Question

I’ve got a stored procedure with a select statement, like this:

SELECT author_ID,
       author_name,
       author_bio
FROM   Authors
WHERE author_ID in (SELECT author_ID from Books)

This limits results to authors who have book records. This is the Books table:

Books:
book_ID INT,
author_ID INT,
book_title NVARCHAR,
featured_book BIT

What I want to do is conditionally select the ID of the featured book by each author as part of the select statement above, and if none of the books for a given author are featured, select the ID of the first (top 1) book by the author from the books table. How do I approach this?

Answer 1

You can use a sub query that orders the data and uses the top statement…

Something along the lines of,

SELECT  author_ID, 
         author_name, 
         author_bio
         , (Select top 1 Book_ID from Books where Authors.Author_ID=Books.Author_ID order by Featured_book desc)
 FROM    Authors 
 WHERE author_ID in (SELECT author_ID from Books)