Question

There is a field in a 3rd party database that I need to group on for a report I’m writing. The field can contain a few different types of data. First it could contain a 3 digit number. I need to break these out into groups such as 101 to 200 and 201 to 300. In addition to this the field could also be prefaced with a particular letter such a M or K then a few numbers. It is defined as VARCHAR(8) and any help in how I could handle both cases where it may start with a particular letter or fall within a numeric range would be appreciated. If I could write it as a case statement and return a department based either on the numeric value or the first letter that would be the best so I can group in my report.

Thanks, Steven

Answer 1

If I could write it as a case statement and return a department based either on the numeric value or the first letter that would be the best so I can group in my report.

case when substring( field, 1, 1 ) = 'M' then ... when substring( field, 1, 1 ) = 'K' then ... else floor( (cast( field as int) - 1 ) / 100) end       select ....    group by      case when substring( field, 1, 1 ) = 'M' then ...     when substring( field, 1, 1 ) = 'K' then ...     else floor( (cast( field as int) - 1 ) / 100) end  

Matt Hamilton asks,

Any reason why you’ve opted to use substring(field, 1, 1) rather than simply left(field, 1)? I notice that @jms did it too, in the other answer.

I know substring is specified in ANSI-92; I don’t know that left is. And anyway, left isn’t a primitive, as it can be written in terms of substring, so using substring seems a little cleaner.