Using TOP To Rank Columns In a Table

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Using TOP To Rank Columns In a Table

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Tim Parker

Posted Monday, October 24, 2011 10:28 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Using TOP To Rank Columns In a Table

BigGrin

Post #1195548

CELKO

Posted Monday, October 24, 2011 11:10 PM

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Why did you encourage him? Sounds like time for re-education w00t

Books in Celko Series for Morgan-Kaufmann Publishing
Analytics and OLAP in SQL
Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice
Data, Measurements and Standards in SQL
SQL for Smarties
SQL Programming Style
SQL Puzzles and Answers
Thinking in Sets
Trees and Hierarchies in SQL

Post #1195554

Carlo Romagnano

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 1:18 AM

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CELKO (10/24/2011)

Why did you encourage him? Sounds like time for re-education w00t

I agree.

Post #1195570

back_of_the_fleet

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 1:29 AM

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Regardless of whether or not this is a "bright idea", it's a little worrying that the developer did not know enough to approach the problem for themself, or have the nouse to research it.

Inflatable sailors never die, they gently deflate over time.

Post #1195572

adam.everett

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:06 AM

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if was just a means to an end then just do a SELECT * FROM and dont bother with the schema extract.
Cringe, really bad a * but so.

Post #1195577

kevriley

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:06 AM

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What was the answer to the question 'why?'?

Post #1195579

sanjay.patel 30254

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:55 AM

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Excellent, removes the need for Cursors, and is very flexible to build up a totally dynamic Select clause that is very very useful indeed...

More like this please.....

Post #1195585

Alberto Zoppo

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 4:14 AM

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For select dthe columns without remove last comma

SELECT TOP 10 @columnName = COALESCE(@columnName + ',' + QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME), QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME))
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = @tableName
AND TABLE_SCHEMA = 'DBO'
ORDER BY ORDINAL_POSITION ASC

Post #1195600

thisisfutile

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 6:25 AM

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I've been coming to these forums long enough to know that Joe Celko was going to respond to this one. I recall Joe discussing the TOP clause in another forum long ago. Correct me if I'm wrong Joe, but TOP isn't to be trusted to pull the "first rows in a table" because tables don't store rows in any particular order. Is that what you were going for in your re-education reprimand? I've always felt it was a little misleading...it should have been called LIMIT or something like that because that's all it's really doing...limiting the result set.

IMHO.

Gabe

Post #1195670

Eric M Russell

Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2011 6:41 AM

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CELKO (10/24/2011)

Why did you encourage him? Sounds like time for re-education w00t

On a slow day, even the best of us may become so distracted by the challenge of solving some small puzzle that we forget to probe into why the puzzle was there to begin with.

"Wise people understand the 10,000 things without going to each one.
They know them without having to look at each one,
and they transform all without acting on each one." - The Tao Te Ching: Verse 47

Post #1195679

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