I have data inside a table's column. I SELECT DISTINCT of that column, i also put LTRIM(RTRIM(col_name)) as well while writing SELECT. But still I am getting duplicate column record.
How can we identify why it is happening and how we can avoid it?
I tried RTRIM, LTRIM, UPPER function. Still no help.
Query:
select distinct LTRIM(RTRIM(serverstatus))
from SQLInventory
Output:
Development
Staging
Test
Pre-Production
UNKNOWN
NULL
Need to be decommissioned
Production
Pre-Production
Decommissioned
Non-Production
Unsupported Edition
Looks like there's a unicode character in there, somewhere. I copied and pasted the values out initially as a varchar, and did the following:
SELECT DISTINCT serverstatus
FROM (VALUES('Development'),
('Staging'),
('Test'),
('Pre-Production'),
('UNKNOWN'),
('NULL'),
('Need to be decommissioned'),
('Production'),
(''),
('Pre-Production'),
('Decommissioned'),
('Non-Production'),
('Unsupported Edition'))V(serverstatus);
This, interestingly, returned the values below:
Development
Staging
Test
Pre-Production
UNKNOWN
NULL
Need to be decommissioned
Production
Pre-Produc?tion
Decommissioned
Non-Production
Unsupported Edition
Note that one of the values is Pre-Produc?tion, meaning that there is a unicode character between the c and t.
So, let's find out what it is:
SELECT 'Pre-Production', N'Pre-Production',
UNICODE(SUBSTRING(N'Pre-Production',11,1));
The UNICODE function returns back 8203, which is a zero-width space. I assume you want to remove these, so you can update your data by doing:
UPDATE SQLInventory
SET serverstatus = REPLACE(serverstatus, NCHAR(8203), N'');
Now your first query should work as you expect.
(I also suggest you might therefore want a lookup table for your status' with a foreign key, so that this can't happen again).
DB<>fiddle
I deal with this type of thing all the time. For stuff like this NGrams8K and PatReplace8k and PATINDEX are your best friends.
Putting what you posted in a table variable we can analyze the problem:
DECLARE #table TABLE (txtID INT IDENTITY, txt NVARCHAR(100));
INSERT #table (txt)
VALUES ('Development'),('Staging'),('Test'),('Pre-Production'),('UNKNOWN'),(NULL),
('Need to be decommissioned'),('Production'),(''),('Pre-Production'),('Decommissioned'),
('Non-Production'),('Unsupported Edition');
This query will identify items with characters other than A-Z, spaces and hyphens:
SELECT t.txtID, t.txt
FROM #table AS t
WHERE PATINDEX('%[^a-zA-Z -]%',t.txt) > 0;
This returns:
txtID txt
----------- -------------------------------------------
10 Pre-Production
To identify the bad character we can use NGrams8k like this:
SELECT t.txtID, t.txt, ng.position, ng.token -- ,UNICODE(ng.token)
FROM #table AS t
CROSS APPLY dbo.NGrams8K(t.txt,1) AS ng
WHERE PATINDEX('%[^a-zA-Z -]%',ng.token)>0;
Which returns:
txtID txt position token
------ ----------------- -------------------- ---------
10 Pre-Production 11 ?
PatReplace8K makes cleaning up stuff like this quite easily and quickly. First note this query:
SELECT OldString = t.txt, p.NewString
FROM #table AS t
CROSS APPLY dbo.patReplace8K(t.txt,'%[^a-zA-Z -]%','') AS p
WHERE PATINDEX('%[^a-zA-Z -]%',t.txt) > 0;
Which returns this on my system:
OldString NewString
------------------ ----------------
Pre-Produc?tion Pre-Production
To fix the problem you can use patreplace8K like this:
UPDATE t
SET txt = p.newString
FROM #table AS t
CROSS APPLY dbo.patReplace8K(t.txt,'%[^a-zA-Z -]%','') AS p
WHERE PATINDEX('%[^a-zA-Z -]%',t.txt) > 0;
We are running many products search on a huge catalog with partially matched barcodes.
We started with a simple like query
select * from products where barcode like '%2345%'
But that takes way too long since it requires a full table scan.
We thought a fulltext search will be able to help us here using contains.
select * from products where contains(barcode, '2345')
But, it seems like contains doesn't support finding words that partially contains a text but, only full a word match or a prefix. (But in this example we're looking for '123456').
My answer is: #DenisReznik was right :)
ok, let's take a look.
I have worked with barcodes and big catalogs for many years and I was curious about this question.
So I have made some tests on my own.
I have created a table to store test data:
CREATE TABLE [like_test](
[N] [int] NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
[barcode] [varchar](40) NULL
)
I know that there are many types of barcodes, some contains only numbers, other contains also letters, and other can be even much complex.
Let's assume our barcode is a random string.
I have filled it with 10 millions records of random alfanumeric data:
insert into like_test
select (select count(*) from like_test)+n, REPLACE(convert(varchar(40), NEWID()), '-', '') barcode
from FN_NUMBERS(10000000)
FN_NUMBERS() is just a function I use in my DBs (a sort of tally_table)
to get records quick.
I got 10 million records like that:
N barcode
1 1C333262C2D74E11B688281636FAF0FB
2 3680E11436FC4CBA826E684C0E96E365
3 7763D29BD09F48C58232C7D33551E6C9
Let's declare a var to search for:
declare #s varchar(20) = 'D34F15' -- random alfanumeric string
Let's take a base try with LIKE to compare results to:
select * from like_test where barcode like '%'+#s+'%'
On my workstation it takes 24.4 secs for a full clustered index scan. Very slow.
SSMS suggests to add an index on barcode column:
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [ix_barcode] ON [like_test] ([barcode]) INCLUDE ([N])
500Mb of index, I retry the select, this time 24.0 secs for the non clustered index seek.. less than 2% better, almost the same result. Very far from the 75% supposed by SSMS. It seems to me this index really doesn't worth it. Maybe my SSD Samsung 840 is making the difference..
For the moment I let the index active.
Let's try the CHARINDEX solution:
select * from like_test where charindex(#s, barcode) > 0
This time it took 23.5 second to complete, not really so much better than LIKE.
Now let's check the #DenisReznik 's suggestion that using the Binary Collation should speed up things.
select * from like_test
where barcode collate Latin1_General_BIN like '%'+#s+'%' collate Latin1_General_BIN
WOW, it seems to work! Only 4.5 secs this is impressive! 5 times better..
So, what about CHARINDEX and Collation toghether? Let's try it:
select * from like_test
where charindex(#s collate Latin1_General_BIN, barcode collate Latin1_General_BIN)>0
Unbelivable! 2.4 secs, 10 times better..
Ok, so far I have realized that CHARINDEX is better than LIKE, and that Binary Collation is better than normal string collation, so from now on I will go on only with CHARINDEX and Collation.
Now, can we do anything else to get even better results? Maybe we can try reduce our very long strings.. a scan is always a scan..
First try, a logical string cut using SUBSTRING to virtually works on barcodes of 8 chars:
select * from like_test
where charindex(
#s collate Latin1_General_BIN,
SUBSTRING(barcode, 12, 8) collate Latin1_General_BIN
)>0
Fantastic! 1.8 seconds.. I have tried both SUBSTRING(barcode, 1, 8) (head of the string) and SUBSTRING(barcode, 12, 8) (middle of the string) with same results.
Then I have tried to phisically reduce the size of the barcode column, almost no difference than using SUBSTRING()
Finally I have tried to drop the index on barcode column and repeated ALL above tests...
I was very surprised to get almost same results, with very little differences.
Index performs 3-5% better, but at cost of 500Mb of disk space and and maintenance cost if the catalog is updated.
Naturally, for a direct key lookup like where barcode = #s with the index it takes 20-50 millisecs, without index we can't get less than 1.1 secs using Collation syntax where barcode collate Latin1_General_BIN = #s collate Latin1_General_BIN
This was interesting.
I hope this helps
I often use charindex and just as often have this very debate.
As it turns out, depending on your structure you may actually have a substantial performance boost.
http://cc.davelozinski.com/sql/like-vs-substring-vs-leftright-vs-charindex
The good option here for your case - creating your FTS index. Here is how it could be implemented:
1) Create table Terms:
CREATE TABLE Terms
(
Id int IDENTITY NOT NULL,
Term varchar(21) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_TERMS PRIMARY KEY (Term),
CONSTRAINT UK_TERMS_ID UNIQUE (Id)
)
Note: index declaration in the table definition is a feature of 2014. If you have a lower version, just bring it out of CREATE TABLE statement and create separately.
2) Cut barcodes to grams, and save each of them to a table Terms. For example: barcode = '123456', your table should have 6 rows for it: '123456', '23456', '3456', '456', '56', '6'.
3) Create table BarcodeIndex:
CREATE TABLE BarcodesIndex
(
TermId int NOT NULL,
BarcodeId int NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_BARCODESINDEX PRIMARY KEY (TermId, BarcodeId),
CONSTRAINT FK_BARCODESINDEX_TERMID FOREIGN KEY (TermId) REFERENCES Terms (Id),
CONSTRAINT FK_BARCODESINDEX_BARCODEID FOREIGN KEY (BarcodeId) REFERENCES Barcodes (Id)
)
4) Save a pair (TermId, BarcodeId) for the barcode into the table BarcodeIndex. TermId was generated on the second step or exists in the Terms table. BarcodeId - is an identifier of the barcode, stored in Barcodes (or whatever name you use for it) table. For each of the barcodes, there should be 6 rows in the BarcodeIndex table.
5) Select barcodes by their parts using the following query:
SELECT b.* FROM Terms t
INNER JOIN BarcodesIndex bi
ON t.Id = bi.TermId
INNER JOIN Barcodes b
ON bi.BarcodeId = b.Id
WHERE t.Term LIKE 'SomeBarcodePart%'
This solution force all similar parts of barcodes to be stored nearby, so SQL Server will use Index Range Scan strategy to fetch data from the Terms table. Terms in the Terms table should be unique to make this table as small as possible. This could be done in the application logic: check existence -> insert new if a term doesn't exist. Or by setting option IGNORE_DUP_KEY for clustered index of the Terms table. BarcodesIndex table is used to reference Terms and Barcodes.
Please note that foreign keys and constraints in this solution are the points of consideration. Personally, I prefer to have foreign keys, until they hurt me.
After further testing and reading and talking with #DenisReznik I think the best option could be to add virtual columns to barcode table to split barcode.
We only need columns for start positions from 2nd to 4th because for the 1st we will use original barcode column and the last I think it is not useful at all (what kind of partial match is 1 char on 6 when 60% of records will match?):
CREATE TABLE [like_test](
[N] [int] NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
[barcode] [varchar](6) NOT NULL,
[BC2] AS (substring([BARCODE],(2),(5))),
[BC3] AS (substring([BARCODE],(3),(4))),
[BC4] AS (substring([BARCODE],(4),(3))),
[BC5] AS (substring([BARCODE],(5),(2)))
)
and then to add indexes on this virtual columns:
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_BC2] ON [like_test2] ([BC2]);
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_BC3] ON [like_test2] ([BC3]);
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_BC4] ON [like_test2] ([BC4]);
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_BC5] ON [like_test2] ([BC5]);
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_BC6] ON [like_test2] ([barcode]);
now we can simply find partial matches with this query
declare #s varchar(40)
declare #l int
set #s = '654'
set #l = LEN(#s)
select N from like_test
where 1=0
OR ((barcode = #s) and (#l=6)) -- to match full code (rem if not needed)
OR ((barcode like #s+'%') and (#l<6)) -- to match strings up to 5 chars from beginning
or ((BC2 like #s+'%') and (#l<6)) -- to match strings up to 5 chars from 2nd position
or ((BC3 like #s+'%') and (#l<5)) -- to match strings up to 4 chars from 3rd position
or ((BC4 like #s+'%') and (#l<4)) -- to match strings up to 3 chars from 4th position
or ((BC5 like #s+'%') and (#l<3)) -- to match strings up to 2 chars from 5th position
this is HELL fast!
for search strings of 6 chars 15-20 milliseconds (full code)
for search strings of 5 chars 25 milliseconds (20-80)
for search strings of 4 chars 50 milliseconds (40-130)
for search strings of 3 chars 65 milliseconds (50-150)
for search strings of 2 chars 200 milliseconds (190-260)
There will be no additional space used for table, but each index will take up to 200Mb (for 1 million barcodes)
PAY ATTENTION
Tested on a Microsoft SQL Server Express (64-bit) and Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise (64-bit) the optimizer of the latter is slight better but the main difference is that:
on express edition you have to extract ONLY the primary key when searching your string, if you add other columns in the SELECT, the optimizer will not use indexes anymore but it will go for full clustered index scan so you will need something like
;with
k as (-- extract only primary key
select N from like_test
where 1=0
OR ((barcode = #s) and (#l=6))
OR ((barcode like #s+'%') and (#l<6))
or ((BC2 like #s+'%') and (#l<6))
or ((BC3 like #s+'%') and (#l<5))
or ((BC4 like #s+'%') and (#l<4))
or ((BC5 like #s+'%') and (#l<3))
)
select N
from like_test t
where exists (select 1 from k where k.n = t.n)
on standard (enterprise) edition you HAVE to go for
select * from like_test -- take a look at the star
where 1=0
OR ((barcode = #s) and (#l=6))
OR ((barcode like #s+'%') and (#l<6))
or ((BC2 like #s+'%') and (#l<6))
or ((BC3 like #s+'%') and (#l<5))
or ((BC4 like #s+'%') and (#l<4))
or ((BC5 like #s+'%') and (#l<3))
You do not include many constraints, which means you want to search for string in a string -- and if there was a way to optimized an index to search a string in a string, it would be just built in!
Other things that make it hard to give a specific answer:
It's not clear what "huge" and "too long" mean.
It's not clear as to how your application works. Are you searching in batch as you add a 1,000 new products? Are you allowing a user to enter a partial barcode in a search box?
I can make some suggestions that may or may not be helpful in your case.
Speed up some of the queries
I have a database with lots of licence plates; sometimes an officer wants to search by the last 3-characters of the plate. To support this I store the license plate in reverse, then use LIKE ('ZYX%') to match ABCXYZ. When doing the search, they have the option of a 'contains' search (like you have) which is slow, or an option of doing 'Begins/Ends with' which is super because of the index. This would solve your problem some of the time (which may be good enough), especially if this is a common need.
Parallel Queries
An index works because it organizes data, an index cannot help with a string within a string because there is no organization. Speed seems to be your focus of optimization, so you could store/query your data in a way that searches in parallel. Example: if it takes 10-seconds to sequentially search 10-million rows, then having 10-parallel processes (so process searches 1-million) will take you from 10-seconds to 1-second (kind'a-sort'a). Think of it as scaling out. There are various options for this, within your single SQL Instance (try data partitioning) or across multiple SQL Servers (if that's an option).
BONUS: If you're not on a RAID setup, that can help with reads since it's a effectively of reading in parallel.
Reduce a bottleneck
One reason searching "huge" datasets take "too long" is because all that data needs to be read from the disk, which is always slow. You can skip-the-disk, and use InMemory Tables. Since "huge" isn't defined, this may not work.
UPDATED:
We know from that FULL-TEXT searches can be used for the following:
Full-Text Search -
MSDN
One or more specific words or phrases (simple term)
A word or a phrase where the words begin with specified text (prefix term)
Inflectional forms of a specific word (generation term)
A word or phrase close to another word or phrase (proximity term)
Synonymous forms of a specific word (thesaurus)
Words or phrases using weighted values (weighted term)
Are any of these fulfilled by your query requirements? If you are having to search for patterns as you described, without an consistent pattern (such as '1%'), then there may not be a way for SQL to use a SARG.
You could use Boolean statements
Coming from a C++ perspective, B-Trees are accessed from Pre-Order, In-Order, and Post-Order traversals and utilize Boolean statements to search the B-Tree. Processed much faster than string comparisons, booleans offer at the least an improved performance.
We can see this in the following two options:
PATINDEX
Only if your column is not numeric, as PATINDEX is designed for strings.
Returns an integer (like CHARINDEX) which is easier to process than strings.
CHARINDEX is a solution
CHARINDEX has no problem searching INTs and again, returns a number.
May require some extra cases built in (i.e. first number is always ignored), but you can add them like so: CHARINDEX('200', barcode) > 1.
Proof of what I am saying, let us go back to the old [AdventureWorks2012].[Production].[TransactionHistory]. We have TransactionID which contains the number of the items we want, and lets for fun assume you want every transactionID that has 200 at the end.
-- WITH LIKE
SELECT TOP 1000 [TransactionID]
,[ProductID]
,[ReferenceOrderID]
,[ReferenceOrderLineID]
,[TransactionDate]
,[TransactionType]
,[Quantity]
,[ActualCost]
,[ModifiedDate]
FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Production].[TransactionHistory]
WHERE TransactionID LIKE '%200'
-- WITH CHARINDEX(<delimiter>, <column>) > 3
SELECT TOP 1000 [TransactionID]
,[ProductID]
,[ReferenceOrderID]
,[ReferenceOrderLineID]
,[TransactionDate]
,[TransactionType]
,[Quantity]
,[ActualCost]
,[ModifiedDate]
FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Production].[TransactionHistory]
WHERE CHARINDEX('200', TransactionID) > 3
Note CHARINDEX removes the value 200200 in the search, so you may need to adjust your code appropriately. But look at the results:
Clearly, booleans and numbers are faster comparisons.
LIKE uses string comparisons, which again is much slower to process.
I was a bit surprised at the size of the difference, but the fundamentals are the same. Integers and Boolean statements are always faster to process than string comparisons.
I'm late to the game but here's another way to get a full-text like index in the spirit of #MtwStark's second answer.
This is a solution using a search table join
drop table if exists #numbers
select top 10000 row_number() over(order by t1.number) as n
into #numbers
from master..spt_values t1
cross join master..spt_values t2
drop table if exists [like_test]
create TABLE [like_test](
[N] INT IDENTITY(1,1) not null,
[barcode] [varchar](40) not null,
constraint pk_liketest primary key ([N])
)
insert into dbo.like_test (barcode)
select top (1000000) replace(convert(varchar(40), NEWID()), '-', '') barcode
from #numbers t,#numbers t2
drop table if exists barcodesearch
select distinct ps.n, trim(substring(ps.barcode,ty.n,100)) as searchstring
into barcodesearch
from like_test ps
inner join #numbers ty on ty.n < 40
where len(ps.barcode) > ty.n
create clustered index idx_barcode_search_index on barcodesearch (searchstring)
The final search should look like this:
declare #s varchar(20) = 'D34F15'
select distinct lt.* from dbo.like_test lt
inner join barcodesearch bs on bs.N = lt.N
where bs.searchstring like #s+'%'
If you have the option of full-text searching, you can speed this up even further by adding the full-text search column directly to the barcode table
drop table if exists #liketestupdates
select n, string_agg(searchstring, ' ')
within group (order by reverse(searchstring)) as searchstring
into #liketestupdates
from barcodesearch
group by n
alter table dbo.like_test add search_column varchar(559)
update lt
set search_column = searchstring
from like_test lt
inner join #liketestupdates lu on lu.n = lt.n
CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG ftcatalog as default;
create fulltext index on dbo.like_test ( search_column )
key index pk_liketest
The final full-text search would look like this:
declare #s varchar(20) = 'D34F15'
set #s = '"*' + #s + '*"'
select n,barcode from dbo.like_test where contains(search_column, #s)
I understand that Estimated Costs aren't the best measure of expected performance but the number's aren't wildly off here.
With the search table join, the Estimated Subtree Cost is 2.13
With the full-text search, the Estimated Subtree Cost is 0.008
Full-text is aimed for bigger texts, let's say texts with more than about 100 chars. You can use LIKE '%string%'. (However it depends how the barcode column is defined.) Do you have an index for barcode? If not, then create one and it will improve your query.
First make the index on column on which you have to put as where clause .
Secondly for the datatype of the column which are used in where clause make them as Char in place of Varchar which will save you some space,in the table and in the indexes that will include that column.
varchar(1) column needs one more byte over char(1)
Do pull only the number of columns you need try to avoid * , be specific to number of columns you wish to select.
Don't write as
select * from products
In place of it write as
Select Col1, Col2 from products with (Nolock)
I have a view that may contain more than one row, looking like this:
[rate] | [vendorID]
8374 1234
6523 4321
5234 9374
In a SPROC, I need to set a param equal to the value of the first column from the first row of the view. something like this:
DECLARE #rate int;
SET #rate = (select top 1 rate from vendor_view where vendorID = 123)
SELECT #rate
But this ALWAYS returns the LAST row of the view.
In fact, if I simply run the subselect by itself, I only get the last row.
With 3 rows in the view, TOP 2 returns the FIRST and THIRD rows in order. With 4 rows, it's returning the top 3 in order. Yet still top 1 is returning the last.
DERP?!?
This works..
DECLARE #rate int;
CREATE TABLE #temp (vRate int)
INSERT INTO #temp (vRate) (select rate from vendor_view where vendorID = 123)
SET #rate = (select top 1 vRate from #temp)
SELECT #rate
DROP TABLE #temp
.. but can someone tell me why the first behaves so fudgely and how to do what I want? As explained in the comments, there is no meaningful column by which I can do an order by. Can I force the order in which rows are inserted to be the order in which they are returned?
[EDIT] I've also noticed that: select top 1 rate from ([view definition select]) also returns the correct values time and again.[/EDIT]
That is by design.
If you don't specify how the query should be sorted, the database is free to return the records in any order that is convenient. There is no natural order for a table that is used as default sort order.
What the order will actually be depends on how the query is planned, so you can't even rely on the same query giving a consistent result over time, as the database will gather statistics about the data and may change how the query is planned based on that.
To get the record that you expect, you simply have to specify how you want them sorted, for example:
select top 1 rate
from vendor_view
where vendorID = 123
order by rate
I ran into this problem on a query that had worked for years. We upgraded SQL Server and all of a sudden, an unordered select top 1 was not returning the final record in a table. We simply added an order by to the select.
My understanding is that SQL Server normally will generally provide you the results based on the clustered index if no order by is provided OR off of whatever index is picked by the engine. But, this is not a guarantee of a certain order.
If you don't have something to order off of, you need to add it. Either add a date inserted column and default it to GETDATE() or add an identity column. It won't help you historically, but it addresses the issue going forward.
While it doesn't necessarily make sense that the results of the query should be consistent, in this particular instance they are so we decided to leave it 'as is'. Ultimately it would be best to add a column, but this was not an option. The application this belongs to is slated to be discontinued sometime soon and the database server will not be upgraded from SQL 2005. I don't necessarily like this outcome, but it is what it is: until it breaks it shall not be fixed. :-x
I have a table defined like this:
Column: Version Message
Type: varchar(20) varchar(100)
----------------------------------
Row 1: 2.2.6 Message 1
Row 2: 2.2.7 Message 2
Row 3: 2.2.12 Message 3
Row 4: 2.3.9 Message 4
Row 5: 2.3.15 Message 5
I want to write a T-Sql query that will get message for the MAX version number, where the "Version" column represents a software version number. I.e., 2.2.12 is greater than 2.2.7, and 2.3.15 is greater than 2.3.9, etc. Unfortunately, I can't think of an easy way to do that without using CHARINDEX or some complicated other split-like logic. Running this query:
SELECT MAX(Version) FROM my_table
will yield the erroneous result:
2.3.9
When it should really be 2.3.15. Any bright ideas that don't get too complex?
One solution would be to use a table-valued split function to split the versions into rows and then combine them back into columns so that you can do something like:
Select TOP 1 Major, Minor, Build
From ( ...derived crosstab query )
Order By Major Desc, Minor Desc, Build Desc
Actually, another way is to use the PARSENAME function which was meant to split object names:
Select TOP 1 Version
From Table
Order By Cast(Parsename( Z.Version , 3 ) As Int) Desc
, Cast(Parsename( Z.Version , 2 ) As Int) Desc
, Cast(Parsename( Z.Version , 1 ) As Int) Desc
Does it have to be efficient on a large table? I suggest you create an indexed persisted computed column that transform the version into a format that ranks correctly, and use the computed column in your queries. Otherwise you'll always scan end to end.
If the table is small, it doesn't matter. Then you can use a just-in-time ranking, using a split function, or (ab)using the parsename as Thomas suggested.
For example I have a table
IPPARSED
127
0
0
1
now I need to pivot the table so it can come like this
1 2 3 4
127 0 0 1
Can you help me how?
You could try using case statements to pivot your table assuming the rows always go in that order:
SELECT (case when (<condition to match first octet>) then IPPARSED else END) as 1,
(case when (<condition to match second octet>) then IPPARSED else END) as 2,
(case when (<condition to match third octet>) then IPPARSED else END) as 3,
(case when (<condition to match fourth octet>) then IPPARSED else END) as 4
FROM <insert_table_name_or_table_definition_here>
Cf. Anthony Mollinaro's SQL Cookbook pg 365.
EDIT: if your having trouble coming up with a <condition to match (...) octet>, you'll need to have the select operate on the results of a query that adds linenumbers to your table somehow. In Oracle, you'd use the rownum psuedocolumn, but that doesn't exist in SQL Server. It does appear that in SQL Server 2005 you can use the ROW_NUMBER() built-in function as column, or possibly use the IDENTITY(...) function as a column in that query.
Hi don't you have another column in your table to aggregate the IP addresses?
Yous should not have only one integer per record without any other group column, do you?
What DB do you use?
I think that you are doing something strangely when a parsed IP comes out as four rows. It should be quite easy to parse directly to a row. Could you perhaps provide your parsing method and/or input format?
I would agree with sheepsimulator's answer, but as you commented on my answer David, if you have no grouping column and several entries in your table it will be difficult to find a matching condition.
If you have only one IP entry (so 4 lines) then you can:
use the lineID (rownum in Oracle) to group
parse the 4 lines ;-)
EDIT: the first solution (using lineID) can be used to parse several IP entries, but it needs sequential inserts in the DB.