How to properly join two tables to use alternative ORDER BY - mysql

Two tables...
people (personid, name, mainordering)
entries (userid, personid, altordering)
"personid" is the common field. My app displays a draggable list users can move around. When done, they click to "lock" in their order.
Table : people
+----------+---------+--------------+
| personid | name | mainordering |
+----------+---------+--------------+
| 1 | Bob | 2 |
| 2 | Charlie | 4 |
| 3 | Jim | 1 |
| 4 | Doug | 3 |
+----------+---------+--------------+
So using mainordering, it would display:
Jim
Bob
Doug
Charlie
entries table might have (for user 16):
+--------+----------+-------------+
| userid | personid | altordering |
+--------+----------+-------------+
| 16 | 1 | 3 |
| 16 | 2 | 1 |
| 16 | 3 | 2 |
| 16 | 4 | 4 |
+--------+----------+-------------+
So if user 16 has already submitted his entry BUT NOT LOCKED IT IN, I want to display his list using altordering. i.e.
Charlie
Jim
Bob
Doug
I'm struggling with the proper join to use. Here is what I tried and isn't working (it's simply ordering by mainordering still)...
$sql = "SELECT * from entries
WHERE userid=".$_SESSION['userid']."
LEFT JOIN people ON entries.personid = people.personid
ORDER BY altordering";
Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Thank you...

Are you sure you don't get an error when using WHERE before JOIN?
It should work like this:
SELECT people.*
FROM people
JOIN entries ON entries.personid = people.personid
WHERE entries.userid={$_SESSION['userid']}
ORDER BY entries.altordering
I assume entries.personid will always have a matching person in people, so you should use an INNER JOIN. You would use FROM entries LEFT JOIN people if you wanted to retrieve altordering even for non-existing people.

Related

MySql add relationships without creating dupes

I created a table (t_subject) like this
| id | description | enabled |
|----|-------------|---------|
| 1 | a | 1 |
| 2 | b | 1 |
| 3 | c | 1 |
And another table (t_place) like this
| id | description | enabled |
|----|-------------|---------|
| 1 | d | 1 |
| 2 | e | 1 |
| 3 | f | 1 |
Right now data from t_subject is used for each of t_place records, to show HTML dropdowns, with all the results from t_subject.
So I simply do
SELECT * FROM t_subject WHERE enabled = 1
Now just for one of t_place records, one record from t_subject should be hidden.
I don't want to simply delete it with javascript, since I want to be able to customize all of the dropdowns if anything changes.
So the first thing I though was to add a place_id column to t_subject.
But this means I have to duplicate all of t_subject records, I would have 3 of each, except one that would have 2.
Is there any way to avoid this??
I thought adding an id_exclusion column to t_subject so I could duplicate records only whenever a record is excluded from another id from t_place.
How bad would that be?? This way I would have no duplicates, so far.
Hope all of this makes sense.
While you only need to exclude one course, I would still recommend setting up a full 'place-course' association. You essentially have a many-to-many relationship, despite not explicitly linking your tables.
I would recommend an additional 'bridging' or 'associative entity' table to represent which courses are offered at which places. This new table would have two columns - one foreign key for the ID of t_subject, and one for the ID of t_place.
For example (t_place_course):
| place_id | course_id |
|----------|-----------|
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 2 |
| 1 | 3 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
| 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 1 |
| 3 | 3 |
As you can see in my example above, place 3 doesn't offer course 2.
From here, you can simply query all of the courses available for a place by querying the place_id:
SELECT * from t_place_course WHERE place_id = 3
The above will return both courses 1 and 3.
You can optionally use a JOIN to get the other information about the course or place, such as the description:
SELECT `t_course`.`description`
FROM `t_course`
INNER JOIN `t_place_course`
ON `t_course`.`id` = `t_place_course`.`course_id`
INNER JOIN `t_place`
ON `t_place`.`id` = `place_id`

MySQL: Group users by cars owned

I'll be honest, MySQL is really not my forte, but I'm learning and knowledge is what I'm seeking here :) I am trying to figure out how to churn out a combined grouped data which eventually will be output as nested JSON (JSON part not necessary for now). So..
I've got a table of people...
user_info:
-----------
id | name
---+-------
1 | Joh
2 | Doe
3 | Bob
along with a table of cars...
cars:
-----------
id | cars
---+-------
1 | Toyota
2 | Honda
3 | Mazda
and a table that groups them, with their registration numbers...
user_cars:
-----------------------------
id | user_id | car_id | reg
---+---------+--------+------
1 | 1 | 2 | AB1
2 | 2 | 3 | BC2
3 | 3 | 1 | CB2
4 | 3 | 1 | AC3
A person can have more than one car and I would like to generate a grouped table as such:
---------------
user | car1
| car2
------+--------
user | car1
| car2
------+--------
I tried the following query:
SELECT
user_info.id,
user_info.name,
user_cars.car_id,
user_cars.reg
FROM
user_info
RIGHT OUTER JOIN user_cars ON user_cars.user_id = user_info.id;
But that's not really what I want. It gives me duplicate of names which doesn't help. Any enlightenment would be very much appreciated.
I'm pretty sure this might have been asked on SO, and I'm using the wrong keywords to search most probably. Like I mentioned, knowledge is what I seek. If it's a redirect to another existing post, that would be very much appreciated too.

Link to multiple foreign rows from one row

I really don't know how this is called so I couldn't find an answer.
For example I have the following tables:
Table products Table users
+----------+----------+----------+ +----------+----------+
| id | name | price | | username | products |
+----------+----------+----------+ +----------+----------+
| 1 | Bread | 1.5 | | James | 1, 2 |
+----------+----------+----------+ +----------+----------+
| 2 | Cookies | 2.0 | | David | 2, 3 |
+----------+----------+----------+ +----------+----------+
| 3 | Milk | 1.2 | | Paul | 3, 1 |
+----------+----------+----------+ +----------+----------+
products.id is the foreign key for users.products.
I would like to get the name and price of all David's products using a MySQL query. This should return the following:
+----------+----------+
| name | price |
+----------+----------+
| Cookies | 2.0 |
+----------+----------+
| Milk | 1.2 |
+----------+----------+
The JOIN function would be the best to use I guess, but David can have just 1 or 100 products. Creating 100 columns to fit all products doesn't sound very efficient.
How can I realize this?
Currently I'm just fetching everything and filter it using PHP, this is not a problem at the moment but as the tables will grow I guess this will be very inefficient.
This could be solved by changing your data model.
users
+----------+----------+
| id | username |
+----------+----------+
| 1 | Fred |
+----------+----------+
| 2 | John |
+----------+----------+
products
+----------+----------+----------+
| id | name | price |
+----------+----------+----------+
| 1 | Bread | 1.5 |
+----------+----------+----------+
| 2 | Cookies | 2.0 |
+----------+----------+----------+
| 3 | Milk | 1.2 |
+----------+----------+----------+
And here comes the magic: You could connect the two tables using a third table:
user_procuct_connections
+----------+----------+------------+
| id | user_id | product_id |
+----------+----------+------------+
| 1 | 1 | 2 | -> Fred has Cookies
+----------+----------+------------+
| 2 | 1 | 3 | -> Fred also has Milk
+----------+----------+------------+
| 3 | 2 | 1 | -> John has Bread
+----------+----------+------------+
If you want a user to be able to own a single product only, then you can remove the id column, an make the user_id and product_id primary key together.
Then when you want to get for example all of Freds products then just
SELECT
*
FROM
products
WHERE
id IN (
SELECT
product_id
FROM
user_procuct_connections
WHERE
user_id = 1
)
You could try this:
SELECT * FROM products pt
where FIND_IN_SET(pt.id,(select us.prices from users us
WHERE us.username = "David"));
Working fiddle: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/4f78d/2
The design for the 'Users' table is wrong. Instead of working around this bad design, please change the design.
So effectively, you design could be as such:
Table Products :
ID Name Price
1 Bread 1.5
2 Cookies 2.0
3 Milk 1.2
Table users :
Username Products
James 1
James 2
David 2
David 3
Paul 3
Paul 1
You see, you can have multiple rows for each user i.e.one row for each product in the Users table. You can maintain another Boolean field to identify which ones are currently 'active' or 'applicable'. Joins' would be much easier in that case. Also, updating records would also be easier. In case, in future you'd want to retrieve & analyse data from historic records, that would be possible too!!!
Another thing with the current design is that times and again you'd have to work around the infamous "comma-seperated values". Let's say you have a record as such:
Username Products
James 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
If you need to sort this data into rows, you'd have to work-around the 'Comma-seperated' values so many times. Imagine doing that for 'n' number of records!!
Hope this helps!!!
If you join the tables like:
SELECT name, price FROM products AS p INNER JOIN user_products AS up ON up.id = p.product_id AND up.user_id = <davids id>
You will get an array where first column will be the name and the second the price. You can then do what you want with it in PHP and change the array. You don't have to filter anymore.

How to store multiple values in single column where use less memory?

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.

Joining from another table multiple times in a MySQL query

I am trying to do multiple joins on the same MySQL table, but am not getting the results that I expect to get. Hopefully someone can point out my mistake(s).
Table 1 - cpe Table
|id | name
|----------
| 1 | cat
| 2 | dog
| 3 | mouse
| 4 | snake
-----------
Table 2 - AutoSelect
|id | name | cpe1_id | cpe2_id | cpe3_id |
|-----------------------------------------------
| 1 | user1 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| 2 | user2 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | user3 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| 4 | user4 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
------------------------------------------------
I would like to see an output of
user1 | cat | mouse | snake |
user2 | mouse | snake | dog |
..etc
Here is what I have tried
SELECT * FROM AutoSelect
LEFT JOIN cpe ON
( cpe.id = AutoSelect.cpe1_id ) AND
( cpe.id = AutoSelect.cpe2_id ) AND
( cpe.id = AutoSelect.cpe3_id )
I get blank results. I thought i knew how to do these joins, but apparently when I'm trying to match cpe?_id with the name of the cpe table.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
You need left join 3 times as well. Currently your query only joins 1 time with 3 critieria as to the join. This should do:
SELECT a.name, cpe1.name, cpe2.name, cpe3.name FROM AutoSelect as a
LEFT JOIN cpe as cpe1 ON ( cpe1.id = a.cpe1_id )
LEFT JOIN cpe as cpe2 ON ( cpe2.id = a.cpe2_id )
LEFT JOIN cpe as cpe3 ON ( cpe3.id = a.cpe3_id )
And you probably mean to INNER JOIN rather than LEFT JOIN unless NULL values are allowed in your AutoSelect table.
I think your design is wrong.
With tables like that, you get it the way it's meant to be in relational databases :
table 1 : animal
id name
1 cat
2 dog
3 mouse
4 snake
table 2 : user
|id | name |
|--------------
| 1 | user1 |
| 2 | user2 |
| 3 | user3 |
| 4 | user4 |
table 3 : association
|id_user | id_animal|
|--------------------
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 3 |
| 1 | 4 |
| 2 | 3 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 |
| 3 | 2
| 4 | 4 |
| 4 | 2 |
| 4 | 1 |
---------------------
Then :
select u.name, a.name from user u, animal a, association ass where ass.user_id = u.id and ass.animal_id = a.id;
In this case, your solution won't produce a good dynamic database. There are other ways to make combinations of multiple tables. I can show you by my own database what you should use and when you should use this solution. The scheme is in dutch, but you'll probably understand the keywords.
Like you, I had to combine my windmills with a kWh-meter, which has to measure the energyproduction of my windmills. What you should do, is this case, is making another table(in my case molenkWhlink). Make sure your tables are INNODB-types(for making Foreign keys). What I've done is combining my meters and mills by putting a pointer(a foreign key) of their ID(in Dutch Volgnummer) in the new table. An advantage you may not need, but I certainly did, is the fact I was able to extend the extra table with connection and disconnection info like Timestamps and metervalues when linking or unlinking. This makes your database way more dynamic.
In my case, I Also had a table for meassurements(metingoverzicht). As you can see in the scheme, I've got 2 lines going from Metingoverzicht to molenkwhlink. The reason for this is quite simple. All meassurements I take, will be saved in table Metingoverzicht. Daily meassurements(which are scheduled) will have a special boolean put on, but unscheduled meassurements, will also me saved here, with the bollean turned off. When switching meters, I need the endvalue from the leaving meter and the startvalue from the new meter, to calculate the value of todays eneryproduction. This is where your solution comes in and an extra table won't work. Usually, when you need just one value from another table a JOIN will be used. The problem in this case is, I've got 2 meassurementIDs in 1 link(1 for connecting and 1 for disconnecting). They both point to the same tablecolumn, because they both need to hold the same type of information. That is when you can use a double JOIN from one table towards the other. Because, both values will only be used once, and just needed to be saved in a different place to avoid having 1 action stored on different locations, which should always be avoided.
http://s1101.photobucket.com/user/Manuel_Barcelona/media/schemedatabase.jpg.html