Code Tips

Row_Number() Part Two

Last Time, we looked at ROW_NUMBER() and saw a little of how it works and how we could use it to remove duplicates. Another one of my favorite uses for ROW_NUMBER() is to get only one row from a one-to-many join. I’ve had situations at work where I need to return one row per Person, but each person had several addresses, several injury codes, and several contacts (people working their case).

In many of those cases, there is nothing to indicate which one of those rows should receive precidence over the others. One might just select from those tables and then take just the MIN() of the primary key, grouping by all other fields, but that makes for very messy and hard to maintain code in my opinion. ROW_NUMBER() gives us a much easier way to handle this problem.

Examine this sql script that gives us a Person Table and a PersonAddress table. One person can have many addresses, but there is no way in the schema to give precidence to one of the addresses over any of the others.

USE tempdb
GO

CREATE TABLE Person (PersonId INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY, Name VARCHAR(50))
GO

INSERT Person ([Name])
SELECT 'Bill'
UNION
SELECT 'Bob'
UNION
SELECT 'Carl'
UNION
SELECT 'Sue'
UNION
SELECT 'Cleo'
UNION
SELECT 'Nick'
UNION
SELECT 'Thomas'
UNION
SELECT 'Jeydro'
UNION
SELECT 'Ronald'
UNION
SELECT 'Jamie'
UNION
SELECT 'Colleen'
UNION
SELECT 'Denise'
UNION
SELECT 'Phil'
UNION
SELECT 'Jim'
UNION
SELECT 'Jack'
UNION
SELECT 'Kathleen'
GO

CREATE TABLE PersonAddress (PersonAddressId INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY, PersonId INT, [Address] VARCHAR(100))
GO

INSERT PersonAddress (PersonId, [Address]) 
SELECT PersonId, CONVERT(VARCHAR, PersonId * 123) + ' ' + UPPER(REVERSE([Name])) + ' ST.'
FROM Person
ORDER BY PersonId DESC
GO

INSERT PersonAddress (PersonId, [Address]) 
SELECT PersonId, CONVERT(VARCHAR, PersonId * 321) + ' SQL DR.'
FROM Person
WHERE PersonId BETWEEN 3 AND 9
GO

SELECT p.PersonId, p.[Name], pa.[Address]
FROM Person p
INNER JOIN PersonAddress pa
ON p.PersonId = pa.PersonId
ORDER BY p.PersonId
GO

DROP TABLE Person 
GO
DROP TABLE PersonAddress
GO

Here is a sample of the results:
One to Many Addresses

Using a similar trick to what we used last time to find unique records, we can alter our select statement so that we only return one address per person. If we change our select statement to this

; WITH Addresses
AS 
(
	SELECT p.PersonId, p.[Name], pa.[Address], ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY p.PersonId ORDER BY p.PersonId ASC) AS RowNum  
	FROM Person p
	INNER JOIN PersonAddress pa
	ON p.PersonId = pa.PersonId
)
SELECT PersonId, [Name], [Address], RowNum
FROM Addresses
GO

We get the following results:
One to Many Addresses With Row Numbers

You can see now that all we have to do is limit the result where the RowNum is equal to one and we have something that we can use (the CTE) in further joins or in reports to ensure that we don’t introduce duplicates to our query.

; WITH Addresses
AS 
(
	SELECT p.PersonId, p.[Name], pa.[Address], ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY p.PersonId ORDER BY p.PersonId ASC) AS RowNum  
	FROM Person p
	INNER JOIN PersonAddress pa
	ON p.PersonId = pa.PersonId
)
SELECT PersonId, [Name], [Address]
FROM Addresses
WHERE RowNum = 1
GO

Our results:
One to One Addresses Thanks to RowNumber

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