How to count the number of times a character appears in a SQL column?

Question

For a user logging table I have in a SQL database, I track the some of the parameters off of a report request. The report allows multiple ID\'s to be passed to it and I sto

Answer 1

SELECT LEN(RequestedReportParams) - LEN(REPLACE(RequestedReportParams, ',', ''))
FROM YourTable
WHERE .....

This is simply comparing the length of the column with the commas, with the length of the value with the commas removed, to give you the difference (i.e. the number of commas)

Answer 2

It seems the quick and dirty way to answer the question you've been asked would be to do this:

select 
    count(*) as cnt
FROM 
    [table]
WHERE 
    RequestedReportParams Like '%,%,%'