Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Combination of Columns with Unique Values

One of the side projects that I am most proud of is the code I wrote to query a table and return a list of columns comprising a potential unique key, which can be found here. Here's a snippet of the write-up I did for it:

"As an ETL developer, I often receive files in which the natural key is either unidentified or misidentified, and I need to determine a combination of columns that uniquely identifies each row (the natural key, which is usually also the primary or unique key of the table holding this data), in order to integrate the data from that file into the database. Many times it is simply not clear what the unique key should be, and this requires a painstaking cycle of guessing and testing combinations of columns for unique values. To address this problem, I developed a stored procedure that will automatically query the table to discover a candidate for the unique key. At first, I wanted to create a tool that would report all unique combos, but due to performance reasons, I later limited that to just the first one discovered. I added a way to retest and exclude that result if the first one is not satisfactory."

You can also follow this link for the complete article:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62086/

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