Question

*UPDATE *

The scope has now developed slightly, and I now need to retreive the fields ‘Id, uri, linkTo’. How does this change things???

I’m using an MS-SQL 2005 db and have the following stored procedure;

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.getNewAds
(
@region
)
AS
BEGIN
SELECT TOP 1 Id, uri, linkTo FROM Adverts
ORDER BY NEWID()
WHERE adRegion = @region
END

I would like to then add ‘1’ to the column named adShown in the same table, for the single result retrieved. What is the simplest / quickest means to do this within the same procedure?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Answer 1

There is a quirky update syntax that will let you assign the value to a variable at the same time as performing an update, but I’m not going to show it to you because it is undocumented, unsupported, and I can’t guarantee that it will continue to work in future versions of SQL Server. Here is the method I would recommend (assuming Id is PK or at least unique):

DECLARE 
  @Id INT, 
  @uri VARCHAR(2048),
  @linkTo VARCHAR(2048);

SELECT TOP 1 @Id = Id, @uri = uri, @linkTo = linkTo
  FROM dbo.Adverts
  WHERE adRegion = @region
  ORDER BY NEWID();

UPDATE dbo.Adverts
  SET adShown = adShown + 1
  WHERE Id = @Id;

SELECT Id = @Id, uri = @uri, linkTo = @linkTo;