SQL can I have a "conditionally unique" constraint on a table?

sql sql-server sql-server-2005 unique-constraint check-constraints
Michael Blackburn picture Michael Blackburn · Jul 19, 2010 · Viewed 19k times · Source

I've had this come up a couple times in my career, and none of my local peers seems to be able to answer it. Say I have a table that has a "Description" field which is a candidate key, except that sometimes a user will stop halfway through the process. So for maybe 25% of the records this value is null, but for all that are not NULL, it must be unique.

Another example might be a table which must maintain multiple "versions" of a record, and a bit value indicates which one is the "active" one. So the "candidate key" is always populated, but there may be three versions that are identical (with 0 in the active bit) and only one that is active (1 in the active bit).

I have alternate methods to solve these problems (in the first case, enforce the rule code, either in the stored procedure or business layer, and in the second, populate an archive table with a trigger and UNION the tables when I need a history). I don't want alternatives (unless there are demonstrably better solutions), I'm just wondering if any flavor of SQL can express "conditional uniqueness" in this way. I'm using MS SQL, so if there's a way to do it in that, great. I'm mostly just academically interested in the problem.

Answer

Arthur picture Arthur · Jul 19, 2010

If you are using SQL Server 2008 a Index filter would maybe your solution:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188783.aspx

This is how I enforce a Unique Index with multiple NULL values

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX [IDX_Blah] ON [tblBlah] ([MyCol]) WHERE [MyCol] IS NOT NULL

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