i'm trying to come up with a way to combine rows in a table based on the longest string in any of the rows based on a row key
example
CREATE TABLE test1
(akey int not null ,
text1 varchar(50) NULL,
text2 varchar(50) NULL,
text3 varchar(50) NULL )
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 1,'Winchester Road','crawley',NULL)
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 1,'Winchester Rd','crawley','P21869')
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 1,'Winchester Road','crawley estate','P21869')
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 1,'Winchester Rd','crawley','P21869A')
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 2,'','birmingham','P53342B')
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 2,'Smith Close','birmingham North East','P53342')
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 2,'Smith Cl.',NULL,'P53342B')
INSERT INTO test1 VALUES ( 2,'Smith Close','birmingham North','P53342')
with these rows i would be looking for the result of :
1 Winchester Road, crawley estate, P21869A
2 Smith Close, birmingham North East, P53342B
EDIT: the results above need to be in a table rather than just a comma separated string
as you can see in the result, the output should be the longest text column in the range of the 'akey' field.
i'm trying to come up with a solution that does not involve lots of subqueries on each column, the actual table has 32 columns and over 13 million rows.
the reason i'm doing this is to create a cleaned-up table that has the best results in each column for just one ID per row
this is my first post, so let me know if you need any more info, and i'm happy to hear about any best practices about posting that i've broken!
thanks
Ben.