Case Statement with Text Search

Question

I have a data-set (using SQL Server Management Studio) that is used for Sales Analysis. For this example, when an agent fufills a Sales Call or Account Review, they list (via a drop-down) what topics they discussed in the call/review. Then there is a corresponding column of the products that client purchased after-the fact (in this example, I'm using automobiles). I'm thinking maybe a case statement is the way to do but in esscence I need to figure out if any of the makers the person suggested exists in the products column:

So in this example, in line 1, they had suggested Mazda and a Toyota (seperate by ";") and Mazda appears in the products line so that would then be marked as effective. Line 3, they suggested Honda but the person ended up getting a Jeep, so that not effective. So on and so forth.

I'd like for it to be dynamic (maybe an EXISTS??) that way I don't have to write/maintain something like 'Effective'=CASE WHEN Topic like '%Mazada%' and Products like '%Mazada%', "Yes", "No" WHEN.....

Thoughts?

Answer 1

If you have a Product table, then you might be able to get away with something like this:

select RowId, Topic, Products,
       (case when exists (select 1
                          from Products p
                          where t.Topic like '%'+p.brand+'%' and
                                t.Products like '%'+p.brand+'%'
                         )
             then 'Yes' else 'No'
        end) as Effective
from t;

This is based on the fact that the "brand" seems to be mentioned in both the topic and products fields. If you don't have such a table, you could do something like:

with products as (
      select 'Mercedes' as brand union all
      select 'Mazda' union all
      select 'Toyota' . . .
     )
select RowId, Topic, Products,
       (case when exists (select 1
                          from Products p
                          where t.Topic like '%'+p.brand+'%' and
                                t.Products like '%'+p.brand+'%'
                         )
             then 'Yes' else 'No'
        end) as Effective
from t;

However, this may not work, because in the real world, text is more complicated. It has misspellings, abbreviations, and synonyms. There is no guarantee that there is even a matching word on both lists, and so on. But, if your text is clean enough, this approach might be helpful.