sql cross join - what use has anyone found for it? [closed]

Answer 1

For charting (reports) where every grouping must have a record even if it is zero. (e.g. RadCharts)

Answer 2

One use I've come across a lot is splitting records out into several records, mainly for reporting purposes.

Imagine a string where each character represents some event during the corresponding hour.

ID | Hourly Event Data
1  | -----X-------X-------X--
2  | ---X-----X------X-------
3  | -----X---X--X-----------
4  | ----------------X--X-X--
5  | ---X--------X-------X---
6  | -------X-------X-----X--

Now you want a report which shows how many events happened at what day. Cross join the table with a table of IDs 1 to 24, then work your magic...

SELECT
   [hour].id,
   SUM(CASE WHEN SUBSTRING([data].string, [hour].id, 1) = 'X' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
FROM
   [data]
CROSS JOIN
   [hours]
GROUP BY
   [hours].id

=>

1,  0
2,  0
3,  0
4,  2
5,  0
6,  2
7,  0
8,  1
9,  0
10, 2
11, 0
12, 0
13, 2
14, 1
15, 0
16, 1
17, 2
18, 0
19, 0
20, 1
21, 1
22, 3
23, 0
24, 0

Answer 3

I had combinations of am insolvency field from my source data. There are 5 distinct types but the data had combinations of 2 of these. So I created lookup table of the 5 distinct values then used a cross join for an insert statement to fill out the rest. like so

insert into LK_Insolvency (code,value)

select a.code+b.code, a.value+' '+b.value 
from LK_Insolvency a
cross join LK_Insolvency b
where a.code <> b.code <--this makes sure the x product of the value with itself is not used as this does not appear in the source data.

Answer 4

A typical legitimate use of a cross join would be a report that shows e.g. total sales by product and region. If no sales were made of product P in region R then we want to see a row with a zero, rather than just not showing a row.

select r.region_name, p.product_name, sum(s.sales_amount)
from regions r
cross join products p
left outer join sales s on  s.region_id = r.region_id
                        and s.product_id = p.product_id
group by r.region_name, p.product_name
order by r.region_name, p.product_name;

Answer 5

I have different reports that prefilter the recordset (by various lines of business within the firm), but there were calculations that required percentages of revenue firm-wide. The recordsource had to contain the firm total instead of relying on calculating the overall sum in the report itself.

Example: The recordset has balances for each client and the Line of Business the client's revenue comes from. The report may only show 'retail' clients. There is no way to get a sum of the balances for the entire firm, but the report shows the percentage of the firm's revenue.

Since there are different balance fields, I felt it was less complicated to have full join with the view that has several balances (I can also reuse this view of firm totals) instead of multiple fields made up sub queries.

Another one is an update statement where multiple records needed to be created (one record for each step in a preset workflow process).

Answer 6

Here's one, where the CROSS JOIN substitutes for an INNER JOIN. This is useful and legitimate when there are no identical values between two tables on which to join. For example, suppose you have a table that contains version 1, version 2 and version 3 of some statement or company document, all saved in a SQL Server table so that you can recreate a document that is associated with an order, on the fly, long after the order, and long after your document was rewritten into a new version. But only one of the two tables you need to join (the Documents table) has a VersionID column. Here is a way to do this:

SELECT DocumentText, VersionID = 
    (
    SELECT d.VersionID                               
    FROM Documents d 
    CROSS JOIN Orders o
    WHERE o.DateOrdered BETWEEN d.EffectiveStart AND d.EffectiveEnd
    )
FROM Documents