How do you return 1 value per row of the max of several columns:
TableName
[Number, Date1, Date2, Date3, Cost]
I n
Unfortunately Lasse's answer, though seemingly obvious, has a crucial flaw. It cannot handle NULL values. Any single NULL value results in Date1 being returned. Unfortunately any attempt to fix that problem tends to get extremely messy and doesn't scale to 4 or more values very nicely.
databyss's first answer looked (and is) good. However, it wasn't clear whether the answer would easily extrapolate to 3 values from a multi-table join instead of the simpler 3 values from a single table. I wanted to avoid turning such a query into a sub-query just to get the max of 3 columns, also I was pretty sure databyss's excellent idea could be cleaned up a bit.
So without further ado, here's my solution (derived from databyss's idea).
It uses cross-joins selecting constants to simulate the effect of a multi-table join. The important thing to note is that all the necessary aliases carry through correctly (which is not always the case) and this keeps the pattern quite simple and fairly scalable through additional columns.
DECLARE @v1 INT ,
@v2 INT ,
@v3 INT
--SET @v1 = 1 --Comment out SET statements to experiment with
--various combinations of NULL values
SET @v2 = 2
SET @v3 = 3
SELECT ( SELECT MAX(Vals)
FROM ( SELECT v1 AS Vals
UNION
SELECT v2
UNION
SELECT v3
) tmp
WHERE Vals IS NOT NULL -- This eliminates NULL warning
) AS MaxVal
FROM ( SELECT @v1 AS v1
) t1
CROSS JOIN ( SELECT @v2 AS v2
) t2
CROSS JOIN ( SELECT @v3 AS v3
) t3
SELECT
CASE
WHEN Date1 >= Date2 AND Date1 >= Date3 THEN Date1
WHEN Date2 >= Date3 THEN Date2
ELSE Date3
END AS MostRecentDate
This is slightly easier to write out and skips evaluation steps as the case statement is evaluated in order.
If you're using MySQL, you can use
SELECT GREATEST(col1, col2 ...) FROM table
Above table is an employee salary table with salary1,salary2,salary3,salary4 as columns.Query below will return the max value out of four columns
select
(select Max(salval) from( values (max(salary1)),(max(salary2)),(max(salary3)),(max(Salary4)))alias(salval)) as largest_val
from EmployeeSalary
Running above query will give output as largest_val(10001)
Logic of above query is as below:
select Max(salvalue) from(values (10001),(5098),(6070),(7500))alias(salvalue)
output will be 10001
Another way to use CASE WHEN
SELECT CASE true
WHEN max(row1) >= max(row2) THEN CASE true WHEN max(row1) >= max(row3) THEN max(row1) ELSE max(row3) end ELSE
CASE true WHEN max(row2) >= max(row3) THEN max(row2) ELSE max(row3) END END
FROM yourTable
here is a good solution:
CREATE function [dbo].[inLineMax] (@v1 float,@v2 float,@v3 float,@v4 float)
returns float
as
begin
declare @val float
set @val = 0
declare @TableVal table
(value float )
insert into @TableVal select @v1
insert into @TableVal select @v2
insert into @TableVal select @v3
insert into @TableVal select @v4
select @val= max(value) from @TableVal
return @val
end