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Archive for November 17th, 2009

Selecting most relevant row

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From Stack Overflow:

I have whole bunch of contact data that may or may not contain all info, like this:

Name Address1 Address2 Email
Test User Address1 Address2 test@example.com
NULL NULL NULL test@example.com

For each email address, I would love to extract the most relevant record, that is the row with the contact information rather than the row with empty fields

To do this we need a sorting criterion: how to tell that a record is considered more relevant than another record. We can use the number of the fields filled as a criterion.

Let's create a sample table:

Table creation details

Written by Quassnoi

November 17th, 2009 at 11:00 pm

Posted in MySQL