Find unique values in a column of comma separated

Question

I have a column "A" that are separated by commas and I want to find all the unique values in Column A.

Here's a very short example:

Column A
111, 222
333
444
777,999

I want a query which gives me the following value:

Column C
111
222
333
444
777
999

Answer 1

Ignoring the obvious problems with your table design as alluded to in all the comments and accepting that this might prove very slow on a huge table here's how I might do it.

First... I would create a statement that would turn all the rows into one big massive comma delimited list.

DECLARE @tmp VarChar(max)
SET @tmp = ''
SELECT @tmp = @tmp + ColumnA + ',' FROM TableA

Then use the table valued udf split described by this SO article to turn that massive string back into a table with a distinct clause to ensure that it's unique.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/2837662/261997

SELECT DISTINCT * FROM dbo.Split(',', @tmp)

Answer 2

You can use the well-known Split function in combation with outer apply to split rows into multiple rows:

select  ltrim(rtrim(s.s)) as colC
from    @t t
cross apply
        dbo.split(',', t.colA) s

Full code example:

if object_id('dbo.Split') is not null
    drop function dbo.Split
go
CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Split (@sep char(1), @s varchar(512))
RETURNS table
AS
RETURN (
    WITH Pieces(pn, start, stop) AS (
      SELECT 1, 1, CHARINDEX(@sep, @s)
      UNION ALL
      SELECT pn + 1, stop + 1, CHARINDEX(@sep, @s, stop + 1)
      FROM Pieces
      WHERE stop > 0
    )
    SELECT pn,
      SUBSTRING(@s, start, CASE WHEN stop > 0 THEN stop-start ELSE 512 END) AS s
    FROM Pieces
  )
go
declare @t table (colA varchar(max))
insert @t select '111, 223'
union all select '333'
union all select '444'
union all select '777,999';

select  ltrim(rtrim(s.s)) as colC
from    @t t
cross apply
        dbo.split(',', t.colA) s