String split column and join to another table

Question

Let\'s say I have 2 tables like this :

Job Offers:

+----+------------+------------+
| ID |    Name    | Categories |
+----+--------         


        

Answer 1

If you can live with one row per category then this will work:

select jo.*, c.name as category
from joboffers jo join
     categories c
     on ',' + jo.categories + ',' like '%,' + cast(c.id) + ',%';

Re-aggregating them into a string is painful in SQL Server (but very possible).

Note: you have a really, really bad data structure. So you should fix it as mentioned in a comment. Why is it bad?

• You are storing numbers as strings.
• You have ids that don't have a foreign key relationship to the reference table.
• You are storing multiple values in a single field.