Each GROUP BY expression must contain at least one column that is not an outer reference

Question

What am I doing wrong here? I am getting this error on:

SELECT LEFT(SUBSTRING(batchinfo.datapath, PATINDEX(\'%[0-9][0-9][0-9]%\', batchinfo.datapath), 8000),         


        

Answer 1

Well, as it was said before, you can't GROUP by literals, I think that you are confused cause you can ORDER by 1, 2, 3. When you use functions as your columns, you need to GROUP by the same expression. Besides, the HAVING clause is wrong, you can only use what is in the agreggations. In this case, your query should be like this:

SELECT 
LEFT(SUBSTRING(batchinfo.datapath, PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9]%', batchinfo.datapath), 8000), PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', SUBSTRING(batchinfo.datapath, PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9]%', batchinfo.datapath), 8000))-1),
qvalues.name,
qvalues.compound,
MAX(qvalues.rid) MaxRid
FROM batchinfo join qvalues 
ON batchinfo.rowid=qvalues.rowid
WHERE LEN(datapath)>4
GROUP BY 
LEFT(SUBSTRING(batchinfo.datapath, PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9]%', batchinfo.datapath), 8000), PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', SUBSTRING(batchinfo.datapath, PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9]%', batchinfo.datapath), 8000))-1),
qvalues.name,
qvalues.compound