Given 2 or more rows that are selected to merge, one of them is identified as being the template row. The other rows should merge their data into any null value columns that the template has.
Example data:
Id Name Address City State Active Email Date
1 Acme1 NULL NULL NULL NULL blah@yada.com 3/1/2011
2 Acme1 1234 Abc Rd Springfield OR 0 blah@gmail.com 1/12/2012
3 Acme2 NULL NULL NULL 1 blah@yahoo.com 4/19/2012
Say that a user has chosen row with Id 1 as the template row, and rows with Ids 2 and 3 are to be merged into row 1 and then deleted. Any null value columns in row Id 1 should be filled with (if one exists) the most recent (see Date column) non-null value, and non-null values already present in row Id 1 are to be left as is. The result of this query on the above data should be exactly this:
Id Name Address City State Active Email Date
1 Acme1 1234 Abc Road Springfield OR 1 blah@yada.com 3/1/2011
Notice that the Active value is 1, and not 0 because row Id 3 had the most recent date.
P.S. Also, is there any way possible to do this without explicitly defining/knowing beforehand what all the column names are? The actual table I'm working with has a ton of columns, with new ones being added all the time. Is there a way to look up all the column names in the table, and then use that subquery or temptable to do the job?