Best way to do nested case statement logic in SQL Server

Sophia picture Sophia · Feb 3, 2009 · Viewed 716.4k times · Source

I'm writing an SQL Query, where a few of the columns returned need to be calculated depending on quite a lot of conditions.

I'm currently using nested case statements, but its getting messy. Is there a better (more organised and/or readable) way?

(I am using Microsoft SQL Server, 2005)


A simplified example:

SELECT
    col1,
    col2,
    col3,
    CASE
        WHEN condition 
        THEN
            CASE
                WHEN condition1 
                THEN
                    CASE 
                        WHEN condition2
                        THEN calculation1
                        ELSE calculation2
                    END
                ELSE
                    CASE 
                        WHEN condition2
                        THEN calculation3
                        ELSE calculation4
                    END
            END
        ELSE 
            CASE 
                WHEN condition1 
                THEN 
                    CASE
                        WHEN condition2 
                        THEN calculation5
                        ELSE calculation6
                    END
                ELSE
                    CASE
                        WHEN condition2 
                        THEN calculation7
                        ELSE calculation8
                    END
            END            
    END AS 'calculatedcol1',
    col4,
    col5 -- etc
FROM table

Answer

Chris KL picture Chris KL · Feb 3, 2009

You could try some sort of COALESCE trick, eg:

SELECT COALESCE(
  CASE WHEN condition1 THEN calculation1 ELSE NULL END,
  CASE WHEN condition2 THEN calculation2 ELSE NULL END,
  etc...
)