Person is one entity, which may or may not have attributes of breeder / owner etc. Keep persons together in one table.

Whether or not you decide to create tables...

Here's a more set-based method - thanks for providing me with the incentive to do this - which uses a "tally" or "numbers" table. It's quite fast, get's a match...

Chris

Try this. There's quite a few elements of this which can be adjusted to fit your data, for instance increasing the token length from 3 will add greater weight to...

Chris, can you post some representative sample data? Datatype of the column, Min / max length of contents and min/max word count would be good also.

Cheers

ChrisM

That's interesting, and not at all what I was expecting. You're matching on one or more words in a varchar column in each table?

I'm doing fuzzy deduping on company...

Chris

I came across this problem recently (the same interview perhaps) and came up with the following. Three tables, 1 2 & 3, which share a pk across some rows in each table....

<<Similar types of answers help you hire similar types of people.>> I hadn't thought of that and you're spot on.

They asked if there was a particular area of TSQL...

Heh heh had this one yesterday <<Why are man hole tops round?>> at an interview for a gig with a mortgage company. I answered "so they fit" and "'cos a...

Hi Loner

I reckon Brandie has nailed this one - if the US market is anything like the market here in the UK, then there's a real shortage of good people...

No worries mate, good luck.

Hey Goodguy, I'm not explaining this well, sorry.

WHERE ...

AND IM.LOCID = CASE WHEN @LOCID > 0 THEN @LOCID ELSE IM.LOCID END

This means "if @LOCID is greater than zero then use...

If the default value for @LOCID will be non-null, then you can do essentially the same substitution with a CASE instead:

WHERE IM.LOCID = CASE WHEN @LOCID > 0 THEN @LOCID ELSE IM.LOCID END

I...

Cool, you're well on the way.

You can use ISNULL in the WHERE clause as follows:

CREATE TABLE #LOCATIONS (LOC_ID int, LOCATION varchar(10))

INSERT INTO #LOCATIONS

 SELECT 1, 'POOL BAR' UNION ALL

 SELECT 2, 'RESTAURANT'...

Hi Goodguy

It's an uphill task because the sproc doesn't fit the sample data or vice versa. Please can you amend one or the other to fit your requirements? I suspect...

Hi Goodguy, of course, you're making perfect sense, thank you for the excellent explanation.

Check out this query, have a look at the result set, I'm sure you will find it...