Question

Without requiring SQLCLR to use a Regex in C#, what is the best way to get just the “stem” of a URL from a table with 500 million rows? The column is VarChar(3000) and the table has rows like this:

http://a.com
http://b.au
http://c.edu?a=3
http://d.com/?a=3
http://d.com/?a=3&b=2
http://d.com/?a=3&b=2

I need to select from the table and get this result set:

http://a.com             1 
http://b.au              1
http://c.edu             1       
http://d.com             3

Thanks.

Answer 1

How about;

;with test (url) as (
    select 'http://a.com' union
    select 'http://b.au' union
    select 'http://c.edu?a=3' union
    select 'http://d.com/?a=3' union
    select 'http://d.com/?a=3&b=2' union all
    select 'http://d.com/?a=3&b=2'
)
select
    rtrim(replace(left(url, charindex('?', url + '?', 1) - 1) + ' ', '/ ', ''))
from test


>>>
http://a.com
http://b.au
http://c.edu
http://d.com
http://d.com

Change to

...,COUNT(*)
from test
    group by rtrim(replace(left(url, charindex('?', url + '?', 1) - 1) + ' ', '/ ', ''))

for the group.