Can I use CASE statement in a JOIN condition?

Question

The following image is a part of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 System Views. From the image we can see that the relationship between sys.partitions and sys

Answer 1

I think you need two case statements:

SELECT  *
FROM    sys.indexes i
    JOIN sys.partitions p
        ON i.index_id = p.index_id 
    JOIN sys.allocation_units a
        ON 
        -- left side of join on statement
            CASE
               WHEN a.type IN (1, 3)
                   THEN a.container_id
               WHEN a.type IN (2)
                   THEN a.container_id
            END 
        = 
        -- right side of join on statement
            CASE
               WHEN a.type IN (1, 3)
                   THEN p.hobt_id
               WHEN a.type IN (2)
                   THEN p.partition_id
            END             

This is because:

• the CASE statement returns a single value at the END
  
• the ON statement compares two values
  
• your CASE statement was doing the comparison inside of the CASE statement. I would guess that if you put your CASE statement in your SELECT you would get a boolean '1' or '0' indicating whether the CASE statement evaluated to True or False