I have a MySQL database that has a member table where there are multiple membership levels (e.g., Basic, Premium) of which a member can have one, and the membership level can change over time. I am working on constructing a query to give a count of the members of each type at any time, so the membership type of each member may be different than it is currently. To do this, I have a few additional tables.
types - Gives id associated with each membership type and its string
timeunits - Gives id associated with each time unit and its string
oldtypes - Gives the old membership type for a member and the time at which it was changed from that type
I know if I want to get a count of the members of each type currently, I can use:
SELECT types.type_desc, COUNT(*) FROM member INNER JOIN types ON member.type = types.type_id GROUP BY types.type_id;
What I'm not sure about is how to get the appropriate values from the oldtypes table given a time unit and use those with the member table to get a snapshot of the members and their memberships at any time. So if I were to get the memberships at timeunit = 2, I would see as a result:
| member_id | name | type |
|-----------|---------|------|
| 1 | Alice | 1 |
| 2 | Bob | 2 |
| 3 | Charlie | 1 |
| 4 | Daisy | 2 |
| 5 | Evan | 1 |
| 6 | Frank | 1 |
| 7 | Gloria | 2 |
| 8 | Henry | 2 |
SQL Fiddle
EDIT: The oldtypes table is constructed such that it gives the membership a member had prior to the listed time, at which point it was changed. So a row reading 4,1,2 indicates that member 4 changed from membership 1 at time 2.
Related
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:
I have 3 tables on my database: users, payment_methods and user_blocked_pm. The users table speaks for itself, the payment_methods stores all the payment methods the company uses, and the user_blocked_pm has the payment methods blocked for a specific user.
+------------------+
| users |
+-----+------------+
| id | user_name |
+-----+------------+
| 1 | John |
| 2 | Davis |
+-----+------------+
+-----------------------+
| payment_methods |
+-----+-----------------+
| id | payment_method |
+-----+-----------------+
| 1 | credit_card |
| 2 | cash |
+-----+-----------------+
+-----------------------------------+
| user_blocked_pm |
+-----+---------+-------------------+
| id | user_id | payment_method_id |
+-----+---------+-------------------+
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 2 | 2 |
+-----+---------+-------------------+
So, following the structure above, both payment_methods are blocked for the user John and cash is blocked for Davis.
Following this structure when there are multiple users and payment methods I'll have multiple records on user_blocked_pm because each user will be allowed to use only a few of the payment methods.
Is there a better way to work this relationship between the users and the user_blocked_pm so that the table doesn't get gigantic?
You do not need the id column in user_blocked_pm table because you going to select on user_id or pm_id
If the number of the allowed pm is less then the number of the not allowed, why not to make a user_allowed_pm table instead of user_blocked_pm
If you have a fixed number of pm for each user then you do not need a table just you create a column for every pm and you put the key of the pm (like a foreign key)
If you have a few user "types", then perhaps you can replace the user_blocked_pm with a user_type_blocked_pm. A "type" is a set of blocked/permitted payment methods. So the user_type_blocked_pm table is small -- has entries for the different types (users who can pay with cash only, users who can pay with credit and cash, etc. ) Then, you can add a column to the users table to indicate the user type.
Your method is fine, and the other ideas so far suggested are also fine. If the number of payment types is small (not more than 7, say - and certainly less than 64!), and finite, then you might also consider a bitwise method, where 1 = credit_card, 2 = cash, and 3 = both. I do this for days of the week, which are unlikely to ever be more than 7.
I need a list of user IDs (course_user_ids) that is currently stored in a single field of a larger table.
I have a table called courses that contains course information with course_id and course_students as such:
-----------------------------------------------------------
| course_id | course_students |
----------------------------------------------------------
| 1 | a:3:{i:0;i:12345;i:1;i:22345;i:2;i:323456;} |
-----------------------------------------------------------
| 2 | a:32:{ … } |
-----------------------------------------------------------
The course_students part contains 3 chunks of information:
the number of students (a:3:{…) -- not needed
the order/key for the array of each student ({i:0;… i:1;… i:2; …}) -- also not needed
the course_user_id (i:12345; … i:22345;… i:32345;)
I only need the course_user_id and the original course_id, resulting in a new table that i can use for joins/subqueries like this:
------------------------------
| course_id | course_user_id |
------------------------------
| 1 | 12345 |
------------------------------
| 1 | 22345 |
------------------------------
| 1 | 323456 |
------------------------------
(ideally able to continue to break out values for other course_ids and course_user_ids, but not a priority:)
| … | … |
------------------------------
| 2 | … |
------------------------------
| 2 | … |
------------------------------
| 97 | … |
------------------------------
| 97 | … |
------------------------------
| … | … |
------------------------------
Note: the course_user_id can vary in length (some are 5 digits, some are 6)
Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Update
My user table does have user_id which can be mapped to course_students or course_user_id, so that is a very helpful observation from below.
I also think I need to use a LEFT JOIN because some students are registered in multiple courses, and I'd like to see each instance/combo.
Let us assume that you have a table name users which contains all users data along with user_id.
Now you can join table courses and table users in following manner:
select c.course_id,u.user_id
from
courses c
join users u
on u.user_id=if(instr(c.course_students,concat(":",u.user_id,";"))>0,u.user_id,c.course_students)
You get the result as per your requirement.
Verify at http://sqlfiddle.com/#!9/3667d/2
Note: The above query works fine if no overlapping between user_id and array index. In case of overlapping, kindly filter data using where-clause
If I got your goal correctly you have users table. And {i:0;i:12345;i:1;i:22345;i:2;i:323456; equal users.id=12345,users.id=22345 etc.
If my guess is correct you can try this solution:
http://sqlfiddle.com/#!9/cfef27/5
SELECT * FROM courses
LEFT JOIN users u
ON courses.course_students LIKE CONCAT('%i:',u.id,';%')
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.
I have developed a website (PHP) that allow staffs to add records on to our system.
Staffs will be adding thousands of records into our database.
I need a way to keep track of what record have been done and the process/status of record.
Here a number of Teams I could think of:
Data Entry Team
Proof Reading Team
Admin Team
When staff (Data Entry Team) completed a record - he/she will then click on the Complete button. Then somehow it should asssign to 'Proof Reading Team' automatically.
A record need to be checked twice from a Proof Reading Team. If StaffB finish proof reading then another member from Proof Reading Team need to check it again.
When Proof reading is done, Admin Team will then assign "Record Completed"
In a few months later record might need to be updated (spelling mistake, price change, etc) - Admin might to assign record to Data entry team.
Is this good data entry management solution? How do I put this into Database Design perspective?
Here what I tried:
mysql> select * from records;
+----+------------+----------------------+
| id | name | address |
+----+------------+----------------------+
| 1 | Bill Gates | Text 1 Text Text 1 |
| 2 | Jobs Steve | Text 2 Text 2 Text 2 |
+----+------------+----------------------+
mysql> select * from staffs;
+----+-----------+-----------+---------------+
| id | username | password | group |
+----+-----------+-----------+---------------+
| 1 | admin1 | admin1 | admin |
| 2 | DEntryA | DEntryA | data_entry |
| 3 | DEntryB | DEntryB | data_entry |
| 4 | PReadingA | PReadingA | proof_reading |
| 5 | PReadingB | PReadingB | proof_reading |
+----+-----------+-----------+---------------+
mysql> select * from data_entry;
+----+------------+-----------+------------------------+
| id | records_id | staffs_id | record_status |
+----+------------+-----------+------------------------+
| 1 | 2 | 3 | data_entry_processiing |
| 2 | 2 | 3 | data_entry_completed |
| 3 | 2 | 4 | proof_read_processing |
| 4 | 2 | 4 | proof_read_completed |
| 5 | 2 | 5 | proof_read_processing |
| 6 | 2 | 5 | proof_read_completed |
+----+------------+-----------+------------------------+
Is there alternative better solution of database design?
i think design it's well done. but may be you want to separate group into groups table, and record_status into status table. If you're storing a lot of records you would store a lot of useless information, at least create an enum type for record_status field and group field
table: groups
id - name 1 - admin 2 - data_entry 3 - proof_reading
...
table: status
id - name 1 - data_entry_processing ...
and if you want the users to be in different groups at a time, you could create users_group table
table: user_groups
group_id - user_id 1 - 1 2 - 1 1 - 4 3 -
4 4 - 4 ....
Hope this helps