Hi Forum,
I am having a problem with incosistent data of two columns with semicolon separated values. Column A and column B should have the exact same number of elements, which is not always the case.
In order to split the values into rows I use the approach from a previous thread
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/06d2a674-c166-49fc-9a70-4fbc383190bb/split-multiple-columns-into-rows-using-xml?forum=transactsql
Joining by the row number I somehow need to normalize the tables that contain the split columns so that both columns are aligned before creating the row number.
If table A has one row and table B has 2, any kind of join would replicate the one row of table A. This gives me a wrong result. What I need is row 1 from table A match row 1 from table B and (non-existing) row 2 from table A with value null match row 2 from table B (vice versa). So:
Table A:
pk manufacturer
1 man A
Table B:
pk partnumber
1 part A
1 part B
should result in Table C:
pk manufacturer partnumber
1 man A part A
1 null part B
how can I achieve this?
TIA
Alex