Recommended method to SELECT multiple columns within a nested subquery in mySQL - mysql

Question

What methods are recommended for Selecting multiple columns within a nested subquery? It's been a while since I've coded any queries and I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around this. The specific challenge is on Line 2 of the code below. The IN operand doesn't quite work here (see error message below), and I'm not sure if it's simply a matter of the syntax I'm using, and/or there is a much better way to go about this (i.e. using the HAVING operand or a JOIN statement)
SELECT * FROM Rules WHERE Rules.LNRule_id
IN(SELECT LNRule_id1,LNRule_id2,LNRule_id3,LNRule_id4 FROM Silhouette
WHERE Silhouette.Silhouette_Skirt=(SELECT Silhouette_Skirt FROM Style
WHERE Style.Style_Skirt='$Style_Skirt')
)
The purpose of this query is to SELECT all the relevant rows in table Rules for a particular value in table Style (i.e. $Style_Skirt), which it does by matching it to one of several factors - in this case the garment's Silhouette. What I am therefore trying to do in this portion of the query is SELECT all rows in table Rules who's ID (LNRule_id) matches values in any of the specified columns in table Silhouette
(SELECT LNRule_id1,LNRule_id2,LNRule_id3,LNRule_id4 FROM Silhouette WHERE Silhouette.Silhouette_Skirt=(...))
Edit
There is a many-to-many relationship (each Silhouette has several applicable Rules, and each Rule can apply to several Silhouettes). All the rules reside in the table 'Rules' (one per row), and each rule has an id ('LNRule_id'). The table 'Silhouette' has columns which tell it which rows need to be called from 'Rules' by 'LNRule_id' (LNRule_id1,2,3,4 indicate which Rules should be called, and store the values of the id's for the relevant rows in table 'Rules')
The error message currently being generated by the IN Operand is:
SQLSTATE[21000]: Cardinality violation: 1241 Operand should contain 1
column(s)

Answer 1

I think you want this query
SELECT * FROM Rules r
JOIN Silhouette s
(ON r.LNRule_id=s.LNRule_id1
OR r.LNRule_id=s.LNRule_id2
OR r.LNRule_id=s.LNRule_id3
OR r.LNRule_id=s.LNRule_id4)
JOIN Style st
ON s.Silhouette_Skirt=st.Silhouette_Skirt
WHERE st.Silhouette_Skirt = '$Style_Skirt'

Answer 2

mysql is complaining that on one side of IN you have a single column, and on the other side you have a multi-column rowset. In order for the IN operator to work, the rowset on the right side of IN must have the exact same number of columns as the left side; in this case, one column.
What you are trying to accomplish could perhaps be achieved if you did something like WHERE LNRule_id IN( SELECT LNRule_Id1 ...) OR LNRule_id IN( SELECT LNRule_Id2 ...) OR ... OR ... but the resulting query would be a monstrosity, and its performance would be horrendous. There may be other ways to go about it too, but anything you try will probably be similarly atrocious.
I do not have enough information to be absolutely sure about what I am saying, but it seems to me that the reason why you have this problem is that your database schema is not normalized. Generally, whenever you see a table with a group of columns having names that all begin with the same prefix and end with a number, it means that someone, somewhere, did not normalize their data.
To address the edit in your question, what you have implemented might conceptually be a many to many relationship, but as far as relational databases are concerned, (you know, the science, the theory, the established practices, the approaches necessary to get things to actually work,) it is definitely not a many to many relationship. Many to many relationships are most certainly not implemented with column1, column2, column3, ... columnN. To be sure that I am not making this stuff up, you can read what others say about many to many relationships here:
Many-to-many relations in RDBMS databases
So, my suggestion, if I correctly understand what is going on, would be to introduce a new table, called SilhouetteRules, which contains two columns, silhouette_id and rule_id. This table will implement a many-to-many relationship between silhouettes and your rules. Then of course you get rid of all the rule1, rule2, rule3, etc. columns from Silhouette.
Once you have done that, you can obtain all silhouettes and all rules associated with them using a query like this:
SELECT * FROM Silhouette
LEFT JOIN SilhouetteRules ON
Silhouette.id = SilhouetteRules.silhouette_id
LEFT JOIN Rules ON
SilhouetteRules.rule_id = Rules.id
The above query will yield multiple rows for each silhouette, where the silhouette fields will be identical from row to row, and only the rule fields will differ. Do not be surprised by this, that's how relational databases work.
Given a given_silhouette_id, you can retrieve all rules associated with it using a query like this:
SELECT * FROM Rules
LEFT JOIN SilhouetteRules ON
Rules.id = SilhouetteRules.rule_id
WHERE
SilhouetteRules.silhouette_id = given_silhouette_id
So, you are going to be using this query as a subquery in queries like the one in the question.
Now, regarding the query in the question, I am unable to tell you exactly how you would need to modify it to get it to work with the normalization that I proposed, because I cannot make sense of it. You see, even if you fix the problem that you currently have with SELECT * FROM table WHERE single-column IN multi-column-rowset, there is another problem further down: the WHERE Silhouette.Silhouette_Skirt=(SELECT ... part would not work either, because you cannot compare the value of a column against the result of a select statement. So, I do not know what you are trying to do there. Hopefully, once you normalize your schema and fix the first problem with your query, then the solution to the second problem will become obvious, or you can ask another question on stackoverflow.
P.S. did Mihai's answer work?