I have a table with a column for agent names and a column for each of the skills those agents could possibly have. Each skill the agent is assigned shows a 1 in the field under that skill.
Columns look like this:
+---------+----------+----------+----------+
| Name | 'Skill1' | 'Skill2' | 'Skill3' |
+---------+----------+----------+----------+
| John | 1 | | 1 |
| Sam | 1 | 1 | |
| Roberta | 1 | | 1 |
+---------+----------+----------+----------+
I would like to make a query that returns a list of all agent names that have a 1 for each particular skill. The query would return something like this:
+-----------+
| Skill 1 |
+-----------+
| John |
| Sam |
| Roberta |
+-----------+
Additionally I would like to be able to query a single name and retrieve all skills that agent has (all rows the Name column has a 1 in) like this:
+-----------+
| John |
+-----------+
| Skill 1 |
| Skill 3 |
+-----------+
I've done this in Excel using an index but I'm new to Access and not sure how to complete this task.
Thanks in advance.
One of the reasons that you are finding this task difficult is because your database is not normalised and so due to the way that your database is structured, you are working against MS Access, not with it.
Consequently, whilst a solution is still possible with the current data, the resulting queries will be painful to construct and will either be full of multiple messy iif statements, or several union queries performing the same operations over & over again, one for each 'skill'.
Then, if you every wish to add another Skill to the database, all of your queries have to be rewritten!
Whereas, if your database was normalised (as Gustav has suggested in the comments), the task would be a simple one-liner; and what's more, if you add a new skill later on, your queries will automatically output the results as if the skill had always been there.
Your data has a many-to-many relationship: an agent may have many skills, and a skill may be known by many agents.
As such, the most appropriate way to represent this relationship is using a junction table.
Hence, you would have a table of Agents such as:
tblAgents
+-----+-----------+----------+------------+
| ID | FirstName | LastName | DOB |
+-----+-----------+----------+------------+
| 1 | John | Smith | 1970-01-01 |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |
+-----+-----------+----------+------------+
This would only contain information unique to each agent, i.e. minimising the repeated information between records in the table.
You would then have a table of possible Skills, such as:
tblSkills
+-----+---------+---------------------+
| ID | Name | Description |
+-----+---------+---------------------+
| 1 | Skill 1 | Skill 1 Description |
| 2 | Skill 2 | Skill 2 Description |
| ... | ... | ... |
+-----+---------+---------------------+
Finally, you would have a junction table linking Agents to Skills, e.g.:
tblAgentSkills
+----+----------+----------+
| ID | Agent_ID | Skill_ID |
+----+----------+----------+
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 4 | 3 | 2 |
+----+----------+----------+
Now, say you want to find out which agents have Skill 1, the query is simple:
select Agent_ID from tblAgentSkills where Skill_ID = 1
What if you want to find out the skills known by an agent? Equally as simple:
select Skill_ID from tblAgentSkills where Agent_ID = 1
Of course, these queries will merely return the ID fields as present in the junction table - but since the ID uniquely identifies a record in the tblAgents or tblSkills tables, such ID is all you need to retrieve any other required information:
select
tblAgents.FirstName,
tblAgents.LastName
from
tblAgentSkills inner join tblAgents on
tblAgentSkills.AgentID = tblAgents.ID
where
tblAgentSkills.Skill_ID = 1
To get all agents with skill1, open the query designer and create the following query:
this will generate the following sql
SELECT Skills.AgentName
FROM Skills
WHERE (((Skills.Skill1)=1));
If you adjust the names you can also paste this query into the sql pane of the designer to get the query you want.
To get all the skills an agent has I chose a parameterized query. Open the query designer and create a new query:
When you run this query it will ask you for the name of the agent. Make sure to type the agent name exactly. Here is the resulting sql:
SELECT Skills.AgentName, Skills.Skill1, Skills.Skill2, Skills.Skill3
FROM Skills
WHERE (((Skills.AgentName)=[Agent]));
If you continue working with this query I would improve the table design by breaking your table into a skills table, agents table, skills&agents table. Then link the skills and agents tables to the skills&agents table in a many to many relationship. The query to get all an agents skills would then look like this in the designer:
Related
In short; we are trying to return certain results from one table based on second level criteria of another table.
I have a number of source data tables,
So:
Table DataA:
data_id | columns | stuff....
-----------------------------
1 | here | etc.
2 | here | poop
3 | here | etc.
Table DataB:
data_id | columnz | various....
-----------------------------
1 | there | you
2 | there | get
3 | there | the
4 | there | idea.
Table DataC:
data_id | column_s | others....
-----------------------------
1 | where | you
2 | where | get
3 | where | the
4 | where | idea.
Table DataD: etc. There are more and more will be added ongoing
And a relational table of visits, where there are "visits" to some of these other data rows in these other tables above.
Each of the above tables holds very different sets of data.
The way this is currently structured is like this:
Visits Table:
visit_id | reference | ref_id | visit_data | columns | notes
-------------------------------------------------------------
1 | DataC | 2 | some data | etc. | so this is a reference
| | | | | to a visit to row id
| | | | | 2 on table DataC
2 | DataC | 3 | some data | etc. | ...
3 | DataB | 4 | more data | etc. | so this is a reference
| | | | | to a visit to row id
| | | | | 4 on table DataB
4 | DataA | 1 | more data | etc. | etc. etc.
5 | DataA | 2 | more data | etc. | you get the idea
Now we currently list the visits by various user given criteria, such as visit date.
however the user can also choose which tables (ie data types) they want to view, so a user has to tick a box to show they want data from DataA table, and DataC table but not DataB, for example.
The SQL we currently have works like this; the column list in the IN conditional is dynamically generated from user choices:
SELECT visit_id,columns, visit_data, notes
FROM visits
WHERE visit_date < :maxDate AND visits.reference IN ('DataA','DataC')
The Issue:
Now, we need to go a step beyond this and list the visits by a sub-criteria of one of the "Data" tables,
So for example, DataA table has a reference to something else, so now the client wants to list all visits to numerous reference types, and IF the type is DataA then to only count the visits if the data in that table fits a value.
For example:
List all visits to DataB and all visits to DataA where DataA.stuff = poop
The way we currently work this is a secondary SQL on the results of the first visit listing, exampled above. This works but is always returning the full table of DataA when we only want to return a subset of DataA but we can't be exclusive about it outside of DataA.
We can't use LEFT JOIN because that doesn't trim the results as needed, we can't use exclusionary joins (RIGHT / INNER) because that then removes anything from DataC or any other table,
We can't find a way to add queries to the WHERE because again, that would loose any data from any other table that is not DataA.
What we kind of need is a JOIN within an IF/CASE clause.
Pseudo SQL:
SELECT visit_id,columns, visit_data, notes
FROM visits
IF(visits.reference = 'DataA')
INNER JOIN DataA ON visits.ref_id = DataA.id AND DataA.stuff = 'poop'
ENDIF
WHERE visit_date < 2020-12-06 AND visits.reference IN ('DataA','DataC')
All criteria in the WHERE clause are set by the user, none are static (This includes the DataA.stuff criteria too).
So with the above example the output would be:
visit_id | reference | ref_id | visit_data | columns | notes
-------------------------------------------------------------
1 | DataC | 2 | some data | etc. |
2 | DataC | 3 | some data | etc. |
5 | DataA | 1 | more data | etc. |
We can't use Union because the different Data tables contain lots of different details.
Questions:
There may be a very straightforward answer to this but I can't see it,
How can we approach trying to achieve this sort of partial exclusivity?
I suspect that our overarching architecture structure here could be improved (the system complexity has grown organically over a number of years). If so, what could be a better way of building this?
What we kind of need is a JOIN within an IF/CASE clause.
Well, you should know that's not possible in SQL.
Think of this analogy to function calls in a conventional programming language. You're essentially asking for something like:
What we need is a function call that calls a different function depending on the value you pass as a parameter.
As if you could do this:
call $somefunction(argument);
And which $somefunction you call would be determined by the function called, depending on the value of argument. This doesn't make any sense in any programming language.
It is similar in SQL — the tables and columns are fixed at the time the query is parsed. Rows of data are not read until the query is executed. Therefore one can't change the tables depending on the rows executed.
The simplest answer would be that you must run more than one query:
SELECT visit_id,columns, visit_data, notes
FROM visits
INNER JOIN DataA ON visits.ref_id = DataA.id AND DataA.stuff = 'poop'
WHERE visit_date < 2020-12-06 AND visits.reference = 'DataA';
SELECT visit_id,columns, visit_data, notes
FROM visits
WHERE visit_date < 2020-12-06 AND visits.reference = 'DataC';
Not every task must be done in one SQL query. If it's too complex or difficult to combine two tasks into one query, then leave them separate and write code in the client application to combine the results.
I think I am before a problem where many of you were before. I have a registration form where a user can pick any language of the planet and then pick his skill level for the respective language from a selectbox.
So, for example:
Language1: German
Skill: Fluent
Language2: English
Skill: Basic
I'm thinking what's the best way to store these values in a MySQL database.
I thought of two ways.
First way: creating a column for each language and assigning a skill value to it.
--------------------------------------------------
| UserID | language_en | language_ge |
--------------------------------------------------
| 22 | 1 | 4 |
--------------------------------------------------
| 23 | 3 | 4 |
--------------------------------------------------
So the language is always the column's name and the number represents the skill level (1. Basic, 2. Average ... )
I believe this is a nice way to work with these things and it is also pretty fast. The problem starts when there are 50 languages or more. It doesn't sound like a good idea to make 50 columns where the script always have to check them all if a user have any skill in that language.
Second way: inserting an array in one of the table's column. The table will look like this:
----------------------------------
| UserID | languages |
----------------------------------
| 22 | "ge"=>"4", "en"=>"1" |
----------------------------------
This way the user with ID 22 has skill level 4 for Germany and skill level 1 for English. This is fine because we don't need to check 50 additional columns (or even more) but it's not the right way in my eyes anyway.
We have to parse a lot of results and find a user with, for example, has level 1 for Germany and level 2 for Spanish without looking for the English skill level - it will take the server's a longer time and when bigger data comes we are in trouble.
I bet many of you have experienced this kind of issue. Please, can someone advise me how to sort this out?
Thanks a lot.
I'd advise you to have a separate table with all the languages:
Table: Language
+------------+-------------------+--------------+
| LanguageID | LanguageNameShort | LanguageName |
+------------+-------------------+--------------+
| 1 | en | English |
| 2 | de | German |
+------------+-------------------+--------------+
And another table to link the users to the languages:
Table: LanguageLink
+--------+------------+--------------+
| UserID | LanguageID | SkillLevelID |
+--------+------------+--------------+
| 22 | 1 | 1 |
| 22 | 2 | 4 |
| 23 | 1 | 3 |
| 23 | 2 | 4 |
+--------+------------+--------------+
This is the normalised way to represent that kind of relations in a DB. All data is easily searchable and you don't have to change the DB scheme if you add a language.
To render a user's languages you could use a query like that. It will give you a row per lanugage a user speaks:
SELECT
LanguageLink.UserID,
LanguageLink.SkillLevelID,
Language.LanguageNameShort
FROM
LanguageLink,
Language
WHERE
LanguageLink.UserID = 22
AND LanguageLink.LanguageID = Language.LanguageID
If you want to go further, you could create another table fo the skill level:
Table: Skill
+--------------+-----------+
| SkillLevelID | SkillName |
+--------------+-----------+
| 1 | bad |
| 2 | mediocre |
| 3 | good |
| 4 | perfect |
+--------------+-----------+
What I've done here is called Database normalization. I'd recommend reading about it, it may help you design further databases.
I have two tables
one as td_job which has these structure
|---------|-----------|---------------|----------------|
| job_id | job_title | job_skill | job_desc |
|------------------------------------------------------|
| 1 | Job 1 | 1,2 | |
|------------------------------------------------------|
| 2 | Job 2 | 1,3 | |
|------------------------------------------------------|
The other Table is td_skill which is this one
|---------|-----------|--------------|
|skill_id |skill_title| skill_slug |
|---------------------|--------------|
| 1 | PHP | 1-PHP |
|---------------------|--------------|
| 2 | JQuery | 2-JQuery |
|---------------------|--------------|
now the job_skill in td_job is actualy the list of skill_id from td_skill
that means the job_id 1 has two skills associated with it, skill_id 1 and skill_id 2
Now I am writing a query which is this one
SELECT * FROM td_job,td_skill
WHERE td_skill.skill_id IN (SELECT td_job.job_skill FROM td_job)
AND td_skill.skill_slug LIKE '%$job_param%'
Now when the $job_param is PHP it returns one row, but if $job_param is JQuery it returns empty row.
I want to know where is the error.
The error is that you are storing a list of id's in a column rather than in an association/junction table. You should have another table, JobSkills with one row per job/skill combination.
The second and third problems are that you don't seem to understand how joins work nor how in with a subquery works. In any case, the query that you seem to want is more like:
SELECT *
FROM td_job j join
td_skill s
on find_in_set(s.skill_id, j.job_skill) > 0 and
s.skill_slug LIKE '%$job_param%';
Very bad database design. You should fix that if you can.
I have a table of users where 1 column stores user's "roles".
We can assign multiple roles to particular user.
Then I want to store role IDs in the "roles" column.
But how can I store multiple values into a single column to save memory in a way that is easy to use? For example, storing using a comma-delimited field is not easy and uses memory.
Any ideas?
If a user can have multiple roles, it is probably better to have a user_role table that stores this information. It is normalised, and will be much easier to query.
A table like:
user_id | role
--------+-----------------
1 | Admin
2 | User
2 | Admin
3 | User
3 | Author
Will allow you to query for all users with a particular role, such as SELECT user_id, user.name FROM user_role JOIN user WHERE role='Admin' rather than having to use string parsing to get details out of a column.
Amongst other things this will be faster, as you can index the columns properly and will take marginally more space than any solution that puts multiple values into a single column - which is antithetical to what relational databases are designed for.
The reason this shouldn't be stored is that it is inefficient, for the reason DCoder states on the comment to this answer. To check if a user has a role, every row of the user table will need to be scanned, and then the "roles" column will have to be scanned using string matching - regardless of how this action is exposed, the RMDBS will need to perform string operations to parse the content. These are very expensive operations, and not at all good database design.
If you need to have a single column, I would strongly suggest that you no longer have a technical problem, but a people management one. Adding additional tables to an existing database that is under development, should not be difficult. If this isn't something you are authorised to do, explain to why the extra table is needed to the right person - because munging multiple values into a single column is a bad, bad idea.
You can also use bitwise logic with MySQL. role_id must be in BASE 2 (0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32...)
role_id | label
--------+-----------------
1 | Admin
2 | User
4 | Author
user_id | name | role
--------+-----------------
1 | John | 1
2 | Steve | 3
3 | Jack | 6
Bitwise logic allows you to select all user roles
SELECT * FROM users WHERE role & 1
-- returns all Admin users
SELECT * FROM users WHERE role & 5
-- returns all users who are admin or Author because 5 = 1 + 4
SELECT * FROM users WHERE role & 6
-- returns all users who are User or Author because 6 = 2 + 4
From your question what I got,
Suppose, you have to table. one is "meal" table and another one is "combo_meal" table. Now I think you want to store multiple meal_id inside one combo_meal_id without separating coma[,]. And you said that it'll make your DB to more standard.
If I not getting wrong from your question then please read carefully my suggestion bellow. It may be help you.
First think is your concept is right. Definitely it'll give you more standard DB.
For this you have to create one more table [ example table: combo_meal_relation ] for referencing those two table data. May be one visible example will clear it.
meal table
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| id | name | serving | price |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 1 | soup1 | 2 person | 12.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 2 | soup2 | 2 person | 15.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 3 | soup3 | 2 person | 23.00 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 4 | drink1 | 2 person | 4.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 5 | drink2 | 2 person | 3.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 6 | drink3 | 2 person | 5.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 7 | frui1 | 2 person | 3.00 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 8 | fruit2 | 2 person | 3.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
| 9 | fruit3 | 2 person | 4.50 |
+------+--------+-----------+---------+
combo_meal table
+------+--------------+-----------+
| id | combo_name | serving |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 1 | combo1 | 2 person |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 2 | combo2 | 2 person |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 4 | combo3 | 2 person |
+------+--------------+-----------+
combo_meal_relation
+------+--------------+-----------+
| id | combo_meal_id| meal_id |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 2 | 1 | 2 |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 3 | 1 | 3 |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 4 | 2 | 4 |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 5 | 2 | 2 |
+------+--------------+-----------+
| 6 | 2 | 7 |
+------+--------------+-----------+
When you search inside table then it'll generate faster result.
search query:
SELECT m.*
FROM combo_meal cm
JOIN meal m
ON m.id = cm.meal_id
WHERE cm.combo_id = 1
Hopefully you understand :)
You could do something like this
INSERT INTO table (id, roles) VALUES ('', '2,3,4');
Then to find it use FIND_IN_SET
As you might already know, storing multiple values in a cell goes against 1NF form. If youre fine with that, using a json column type is a great way and has good methods to query properly.
SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE JSON_CONTAINS(column_name, '"value 2"', '$')
Will return any entry with json data like
[
"value",
"value 2",
"value 3"
]
Youre using json, so remember, youre query performance will go down the drain.
Imagine the following (very bad) table design in MSSQL2008R2:
Table "Posts":
| Id (PK, int) | DatasourceId (PK, int) | QuotedPostIds (nvarchar(255)) | [...]
| 1 | 1 | | [...]
| 2 | 1 | 1 | [...]
| 2 | 2 | 1 | [...]
[...]
| 102322 | 2 | 123;45345;4356;76757 | [...]
So, the column QuotedPostIds contains a semicolon-separated list of self-referencing PostIds (Kids, don't do that at home!). Since this design is ugly as a hell, I'd like to extract the values from the QuotedPostIds table to a new n:m relationship table like this:
Desired new table "QuotedPosts":
| QuotingPostId (int) | QuotedPostId (int) | DatasourceId (int) |
| 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 2 |
[...]
| 102322 | 123 | 2 |
| 102322 | 45345 | 2 |
| 102322 | 4356 | 2 |
| 102322 | 76757 | 2 |
The primary key for this table could either be a combination of QuotingPostId, QuotedPostId and DatasourceID or an additional artificial key generated by the database.
It is worth noticing that the current Posts table contains about 6,300,000 rows but only about 285,000 of those have a value set in the QuotedPostIds column. Therefore, it might be a good idea to pre-filter those rows. In any case, I'd like to perform the normalization using internal MSSQL functionality only, if possible.
I already read other posts regarding this topic which mostly dealt with split functions but neither could I find out how exactly to create the new table and also copying the appropriate value from the Datasource column, nor how to filter the rows to touch accordingly.
Thank you!
€dit: I thought it through and finally solved the problem using an external C# program instead of internal MSSQL functionality. Since it seems that it could have been done using Mikael Eriksson's suggestion, I will mark his post as an answer.
From comments you say you have a string split function that you you don't know how to use with a table.
The answer is to use cross apply something like this.
select P.Id,
S.Value
from Posts as P
cross apply dbo.Split(';', P.QuotedPostIds) as S