update column if the data is null by comparing all columns - mysql

i have encountered a scenario where i want to compare the columns which are null and update the data to that column which has the 1st occurrence of null for example :
id institute_name_1 institute_name_2 institute_name_3 institute_name_4
1 xyz null null null
2 abc pqr null null
now if i want to update add the institute name of user 1 then it should be update on institute_name_2 column and if user with id 2 wants to add institute then it should be updated on institute_name_3

This is pretty bad table design. Here is suggested version of your table, using the same data:
user_id | institute_name
1 | xyz
2 | abc
2 | pqr
That is, store each relationship between a user and an institute in a separate record. Then, adding or removing relationships maps directly to adding or removing records.
If you really needed to keep track of which user/institute entry were first, second, etc., then you should probably have a dedicated column for that. Perhaps a time_inserted datetime column would make sense:
user_id | institute_name | time_inserted
1 | xyz | 2018-10-25 12:00:03
2 | abc | 2018-10-25 13:55:23
2 | pqr | 2018-10-25 14:02:00
Now the "second" institute for user #2 can be determined using the time_inserted column which provides an ordering.

Related

How to refer to a record in a table without a primary key

I have created a table without any primary key and it contains some exactly identical records.
How do I update or view a record using SQL statements?
The structure of my table is like :-
+----------------+-------+---------+----------+
| Name | class | section | City |
+----------------+-------+---------+----------+
| Mohit Yadav | 10 | A | Neemrana |
| Mohit Yadav | 10 | A | Neemrana |
| Janvi Yadav | 10 | A | Neemrana |
| Jaspreet Singh | 11 | B | Jaipur |
| Jaspreet Singh | 11 | B | NULL |
+----------------+-------+---------+----------+
Can we refer to the second record and change the class to 11th using update command.
Something like this would work:-
UPDATE <SOMETBL> SET CLASS='11' WHERE {INDEX_OF_RECORD=1};
Please rectify the part written inside the curly brackets so that I can refer to a record using its index.
First of all, not having a primary key is not a good idea at all, it is always a good practice to have the so-called ID column. But as it is the case now, there would be some ways.
The first and second records are exactly identical, as you said. So there is no actual difference between them to distinguish. So it doesn't matter at all to change the first row or the second one, and a good approach to achieve so is to put limitation on number of rows the update query affect on. you can simply use this
UPDATE <SOMETBL> SET CLASS='11' WHERE
NAME ='Mohit Yadav' AND
CLASS ='10' AND
SECTION ='A' AND
CITY ='Neemrana'
LIMIT 1;
The easiest way to solve this is to add an auto incrementing column and then refer to the record by its now unique int:
ALTER TABLE `t` ADD `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY

MySQL link two tables together implicitly

Suppose we have two tables
A table called people with people linked to a bank account balances
| id | name | account_id |
--------------------------
| 1 | bob | 11 |
--------------------------
| 2 | sam | 22
A table called accounts with bank account balances
| id | value |
--------------
| 11 | 200 |
--------------
| 22 | 500 |
In order to link the two tables you can do
SELECT a.value as account_balance
FROM people p
WHERE p.name="bob"
LEFT JOIN accounts a ON p.account_id = a.id`
This would return
id => 1
name => bob
account_balance => 200
That's cool - but I am wondering if there is a more implicit way to do this via SQL linkage (foreign keys or otherwise). Can we in MySQL add links in some other way so that when we do a SELECT, it already knows to return value instead of **account_id **?
I'm asking this because I am creating a system where my users can create lookup tables and link them to other tables - but it must be do-able without any programming. The only other way I can think of is to set the name of account_id for example to accounts.value and treat that as a foreign key when doing a SELECT.
I would have to get the column structure and analyze and then determine that there is a foreign key and then return the appropriate foreign column by looking at the column name.

How To Design A Database for a "Check In" Social Service

I want to build a "check in" service like FourSquare or Untappd.
How do I design a suitable database schema for storing check-ins?
For example, suppose I'm developing "CheeseSquare" to help people keep track of the delicious cheeses they've tried.
The table for the items into which one can check in is fairly simple and would look like
+----+---------+---------+-------------+--------+
| ID | Name | Country | Style | Colour |
+----+---------+---------+-------------+--------+
| 1 | Brie | France | Soft | White |
| 2 | Cheddar | UK | Traditional | Yellow |
+----+---------+---------+-------------+--------+
I would also have a table for the users, say
+-----+------+---------------+----------------+
| ID | Name | Twitter Token | Facebook Token |
+-----+------+---------------+----------------+
| 345 | Anne | qwerty | poiuyt |
| 678 | Bob | asdfg | mnbvc |
+-----+------+---------------+----------------+
What's the best way of recording that a user has checked in to a particular cheese?
For example, I want to record how many French cheeses Anne has checked-in. Which cheeses Bob has checked into etc. If Cersei has eaten Camembert more than 5 times etc.
Am I best putting this information in the user's table? E.g.
+-----+------+------+--------+------+------+---------+---------+
| ID | Name | Blue | Yellow | Soft | Brie | Cheddar | Stilton |
+-----+------+------+--------+------+------+---------+---------+
| 345 | Anne | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| 678 | Bob | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
+-----+------+------+--------+------+------+---------+---------+
That looks rather ungainly and hard to maintain. So should I have separate tables for recordings check in?
No, don't put it into the users table. That information is better stored in a join table which represents a many-to-many relationship between users and cheeses.
The join table (we'll call cheeses_users) must have at least two columns (user_ID, cheese_ID), but a third (a timestamp) would be useful too. If you default the timestamp column to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, you need only insert the user_ID, cheese_ID into the table to log a checkin.
cheeses (ID) ⇒ (cheese_ID) cheeses_users (user_ID) ⇐ users (ID)
Created as:
CREATE TABLE cheeses_users
cheese_ID INT NOT NULL,
user_ID INT NOT NULL,
-- timestamp defaults to current time
checkin_time DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
-- (add any other column *specific to* this checkin (user+cheese+time))
--The primary key is the combination of all 3
-- It becomes impossible for the same user to log the same cheese
-- at the same second in time...
PRIMARY KEY (cheese_ID, user_ID, checkin_time),
-- FOREIGN KEYs to your other tables
FOREIGN KEY (cheese_ID) REFERENCES cheeses (ID),
FOREIGN KEY (user_ID) REFERENCES users (ID),
) ENGINE=InnoDB; -- InnoDB is necessary for the FK's to be honored and useful
To log a checkin for Bob & Cheddar, insert with:
INSERT INTO cheeses_users (cheese_ID, user_ID) VALUES (2, 678);
To query them, you join through this table. For example, to see the number of each cheese type for each user, you might use:
SELECT
u.Name AS username,
c.Name AS cheesename,
COUNT(*) AS num_checkins
FROM
users u
JOIN cheeses_users cu ON u.ID = cu.user_ID
JOIN cheeses c ON cu.cheese_ID = c.ID
GROUP BY
u.Name,
c.Name
To get the 5 most recent checkins for a given user, something like:
SELECT
c.Name AS cheesename,
cu.checkin_time
FROM
cheeses_users cu
JOIN cheeses c ON cu.cheese_ID = c.ID
WHERE
-- Limit to Anne's checkins...
cu.user_ID = 345
ORDER BY checkin_time DESC
LIMIT 5
Let's define more clearly, so you can tell me if I'm wrong:
Cheese instances exist and aren't divisible ("Cheddar/UK/Traditional/Yellow" is a valid checkinable cheese, but "Cheddar" isn't, nor is "Yellow" or "Cheddar/France/...)
Users check into a single cheese instance at a given time
Users can re-check into the same cheese instance at a later date.
If this is the case, then to store fully normalized data, and to be able to retrieve that data's history, you need a third relational table linking the two existing tables.
+-----+------------+---------------------+
| uid | cheese_id | timestamp |
+----+-------------+---------------------+
| 345 | 1 | 2014-05-04 19:04:38 |
| 345 | 2 | 2014-05-08 19:04:38 |
| 678 | 1 | 2014-05-09 19:04:38 |
+-----+------------+---------------------+
etc. You can add extra columns to correspond to the cheese data, but strictly speaking you don't need to.
By putting all this in a third table, you potentially improve both performance and flexibility. You can always reconstruct the additions to the users table you mooted, using aggregate queries.
If you really decide you don't need the timestamps, then you'd replace them with basically the equivalent of a COUNT(*) field:
+-----+------------+--------------+
| uid | cheese_id | num_checkins |
+----+-------------+--------------+
| 345 | 1 | 15 |
| 345 | 2 | 3 |
| 678 | 1 | 8 |
+-----+------------+--------------+
That would dramatically reduce the size of your joining table, although obviously there's less of a "paper trail", should you need to reconstruct your data (and possibly say to a user "oh, yeah, we forgot to record your checkin on such-a-date.")
The entities 'User' and 'Cheese' have a many-to-many relationship. A user can have multiple cheeses he checked into, and a cheese can have multiple people that checked into it.
The only right way to design this in a relational database is to store it into a separate table. There are many reasons why storing it into the user table for instance, is a very bad idea. Read up on normalizing databases for more info on this.
Your table should look something like this:
CheckIns(CheeseId, UserId, (etc...))
Other useful columns might include date or rating, or whatever you want to store about a particular relationship between a user and a cheese.

How to select multiple entries with the same value in one column in T-SQL

So, I am working in Visual Studio 2013. And I have a table like this:
id | fk | data
----------------------
1 | 1 | something1
2 | 1 | something2
3 | 1 | something3
. | . | ...
. | . | ...
6 | 2 | ...
The fk is a foreign key to another table. I want to select all the rows which have the same fk. There is an undefined number of the same fk entries (there could be 5 rows with value 1 and 3 rows with value 2, etc.) But, I want to be able to switch said fk in my program so that when i put the DB in a Form in Visual Studio, clicking a button next would get me the next value of the fk. For example, I would like the first result to come out like this:
id | fk | data
----------------------
1 | 1 | something1
2 | 1 | something2
3 | 1 | something3
And when I click next to get me to the next entry, the result would be:
id | fk | data
----------------------
6 | 2 | ....
7 | 2 | ....
Is there a way in SQL to combine just the results with the same fk value? All of the solutions I have found so far gave me all of the fk values (all entries). I haven't found a way to get just all the entries with a single, unique value in the fk column.
You're looking for a basic SELECT statement with a WHERE clause:
SELECT
id, fk, data
FROM
your_table_name
WHERE
fk = 1
I can't help you with the VisualStudio stuff though, but you'll just have to repeat the same query incrementing the fk value in the WHERE clause

How to update a 'Sort Index' column of a list of records with one call

Basically, I have a list of records in a mysql db. These records are ordered 1 to 10. The user can re-order these records to whatever order they want. They will press a button to update all the records to their newly, respective order number. For example:
ID | Sort_Index | Name
----------------------
1 | 1 | Jim
2 | 2 | Bob
3 | 3 | Carl
4 | 4 | Bill
5 | 5 | Wendy
The user can change these to this for example:
Note: the changed values are stored into an array before I make the UPDATE calls
ID | Sort_Index | Name
----------------------
1 | 1 | Carl
2 | 2 | Wendy
3 | 3 | Bob
4 | 4 | Jim
5 | 5 | Bill
My question is, how can I make this mysql call with one call, using the new values in my array, instead of one call for each record?
If this is impossible or simply the "wrong way to do it", please feel free to suggest new ideas as I am not fully committed to this idea as of now.
If you have a limited number of rows, you could implement this with an sql CASE statement --
Update users set sort_index = case id when 1 then <newval> when 2 then <newval>...