Relationship data in Easy Way

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Recently I worked on one optimisation job. It was procedure that processed multi-relationship data provided by clients in excel format, and created relationship tables.

For example data like :-
1) Domain, SubDomain, Technology, Service, Activity, SubActivity
or
2) Country, State, province, county, city, town

The code handled the task using T-SQL cursor, and was taking more than an hour. So let’s see the sample data first, and then design our simple and elegent solution using Ranking Functions, which ultimately in my case took only 10 minutes.

Relationship-Data

Now, as per our requirement, we need above data to populate below tables:-

After populating above relationship tables, result set should look like as below:-

So how do we achieve that?

With T-SQL cursor, it took 500+ lines of code with 4-5 levels of control-flow nesting (If Else) to implement the logic. Even after this much effort, it was executing in more than an hour’s time. So what option do we have?

Ranking Functions which were first introduced with SQL Server 2008 comes to our rescue. Let’s see the solution implementation using it.

Lines 1-9: Creates table with distinct relationship records provided by client. Yes, clients can make mistake by providing duplicate entries.
Lines 11-38: Creates dummy location id for each relationship element maintaining its relationship

Let’s see output of temp table #Locations_Temp.

As the result show, we have generated dummy location ids for our base logic based on below combination sets:-
(Country),
(Country, State),
(Country, State, Province),
(Country, State, Province, County),
(Country, State, Province, County, City),
(Country, State, Province, County, City, Town).

This serves as primary data for our subsequent tables.

Till now, we have generated dummy location ids for our relationship element, but the field LocationID of table dbo.TBL_LOCATION is primary key. So location id for country and State cannot be same as in above result. Hence, we need below step to modify the Location ids for child elements by adding up count of parent elements.

Let’s see output of temp table [#Locations_Temp_Derived]

That’s it. Our salad is ready, we need to decorate it on plate. Let’s do that as well.

So our data for first and also the main relationship table [TBL_Location] is ready. Below is the output.

SELECT * FROM [TBL_Location]
LocationIDLocation_TypeName
1CountryC1
2CountryC2
3StateS1
4StateS2
5StateS1
6StateS2
7ProvinceP1
8ProvinceP2
9ProvinceP2
10ProvinceP3
11ProvinceP1
12ProvinceP2
13ProvinceP2
14ProvinceP3
15CountyCNTY01
16CountyCNTY02
17CountyCNTY01
18CountyCNTY02
19CountyCNTY01
20CountyCNTY02
21CountyCNTY01
22CountyCNTY02
23CityCTY01
24CityCTY01
25CityCTY01
26CityCTY02
27CityCTY01
28CityCTY01
29CityCTY01
30CityCTY02
31TownT1
32TownT2
33TownT2
34TownT1
35TownT1
36TownT2
37TownT2
38TownT1

Now, lets populate out derived reference table TBL_Location_XREF].

And we are done. Hurrah! Below is the output for [TBL_Location_XREF] table.

SELECT * FROM [TBL_Location_XREF]
LocationIDParent_LocationID
31
41
52
62
73
83
94
104
115
125
136
146
157
168
179
1810
1911
2012
2113
2214
2315
2416
2517
2618
2719
2820
2921
3022
3123
3224
3325
3426
3527
3628
3729
3830

CONCLUSION: It’s very easy to work with multi-relationship or hierarchical data using Ranking Functions. This way we can eliminate hours of execution time along with complex and lengthy code. Thanks for reading 🙂

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