Question

Suppose I have a table with following data:

gameId  difficultyLevel  numberOfQuestions
--------------------------------------------
1           1                 2
1           2                 2
1           3                 1

In this example the game is configured for 5 questions, but I’m looking for a SQL statement that will work for n number of questions.

What I need is a SQL statement that given a question, displayOrder will return the current difficulty level of question. For example – given a displayOrder of 3, with the table data above, will return 2.

Can anyone advise how the query should look like?

Answer 1

things might be easier for you if you change your design as duffymo suggests, but if you must do it that way, here’s a query that should do the trick.

SELECT MIN(difficultyLevel) as difficltyLevel
FROM 
(
    SELECT difficltyLevel, (SELECT sum(numberOfQuestions) FROM yourtable sub WHERE sub.difficultyLevel <= yt.difficultyLevel ) AS questionTotal
    FROM yourTable yt
) AS innerSQL
WHERE innerSQL.questionTotal >= @displayOrder