Get records not in table (MySQL) - mysql

I have three tables: Member, Meeting and Member_Meeting. The names alone should give away what they contain. Member is for registered members, Meeting is for past and future meetings and Member_Meeting is for members who have or will be attending meetings. I can use inner joins to get data in both tables, left joins to get data in both but also on the left, right joins to get data in both but also on the right and (full) outer joins to get data from both and right and left. What I need however is data that only exists in Member but not in Member_Meeting. In other words, I need to get all the members that exist but have not ever attended a meeting and therefore do not have a record in the Member_Meeting. What I need is sort of like a left join or a right join but without what the tables have in common.

There's two ways of doing this. The first is to do a subquery using NOT IN():
SELECT * FROM Member WHERE ID NOT IN(SELECT DISTINCT MemebrID FROM Member_Meeting)
The other option is to do a LEFT JOIN and then filter on the null values
SELECT Member.* FROM Member
LEFT JOIN Member_Meeting ON Member.ID = Member_Meeting.MemberID
WHERE Member_Meeting.MemberID IS NULL

Related

How to create an Outer Join on 4 Tables to get all values Plus Count of 1 field

I have 4 tables which need to be joined. They are:
Contractors
Crews
Skill_type
Location
I also need to be able to count the number of contractors in each crew.
I have created some SQL (MySql) which does the job nicely:
Select contractors.crew_id as contractors_crew_id,
auburntree.crews.crew_name, count(*) as members, skill_type.skill,
location.location_name
FROM contractors
JOIN auburntree.crews on contractors.crew_id=crews.id
JOIN skill_type on skill_type.skill_id = crews.skill_id
JOIN location on location.id = crews.location_id
GROUP BY contractors.crew_id ;
The contractors table contains a foreign key reference to which crew they are assigned to. Hence the column "contractors_crew_id"
I get a nice result, as you can see in this screen capture image:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5elaUk7GlRoS0JWblE3ZzFXY0E/view?usp=sharing
Problem Defined:
I need to define an empty crew first before I add contractors/members. I will give it a name, a skill and a location. I might define an empty crew several days in advance. Currently an empty crew does not show up in my results.
I want to see:
contractors_crew_id = Null, crew_name, skill_type, Location, members 0
I have tried using RIGHT OUTER JOIN on my tables and I still do not see empty crew. LEFT OUTER JOIN does not work either.
contractors_crew_id will be Null at that point, as no contractors have been assigned yet.
I Hope this makes, sense - sorry it is a bit long and complicated. I have tried really hard to explain in.
Many Thanks !!
Because you are actually focussing on information about crews, and not contractors, I would suggest to start by querying the crews table (in the FROM part of your query) and then join the other tables.
Using a LEFT JOIN on the contractors table should then give you the desired result. Since crews is now the "left" table in the query, the result will include all rows from crews, even when there is no corresponding contractor. This answer explains it very well.
This query works for me on test tables based on your examples:
SELECT
contractors.crew,
crews.crew,
COUNT(contractors.id) as members,
skills.skill,
locations.location
FROM crews
JOIN skills ON crews.skill = skills.id
JOIN locations ON crews.location = locations.id
LEFT JOIN contractors ON contractors.crew = crews.id
GROUP BY contractors.crew, crews.id;
To see for yourself, try this SQL Fiddle.
Try this, instead:
Select contractors.crew_id as contractors_crew_id, crews.crew_name, count(*) as members, skill_type.skill, location.location_name
FROM crews
LEFT OUTER JOIN contractors on contractors.crew_id=crews.id
LEFT OUTER JOIN skill_type on skill_type.skill_id = crews.skill_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN location on location.id = crews.location_id
GROUP BY contractors.crew_id ;
That should pull all crews, regardless of whether or not they have contractors assigned. The way you wrote your original query starts by looking at your contractors and then pulling in any crews they might be assigned to. Crews is clearly your focal table here, so you should be joining the rest of your tables to it, rather than to the contractors table.

MySQL SELECT from two tables with COUNT

i have two tables as below:
Table 1 "customer" with fields "Cust_id", "first_name", "last_name" (10 customers)
Table 2 "cust_order" with fields "order_id", "cust_id", (26 orders)
I need to display "Cust_id" "first_name" "last_name" "order_id"
to where i need count of order_id group by cust_id like list total number of orders placed by each customer.
I am running below query, however, it is counting all the 26 orders and applying that 26 orders to each of the customer.
SELECT COUNT(order_id), cus.cust_id, cus.first_name, cus.last_name
FROM cust_order, customer cus
GROUP BY cust_id;
Could you please suggest/advice what is wrong in the query?
You issue here is that you have told the database how these two tables are 'connected', or what they should be connected by:
Have a look at this image:
~IMAGE SOURCE
This effectively allows you to 'join' two tables together, and use a query between them.
so you might want to use something like:
SELECT COUNT(B.order_id), A.cust_id, A.first_name, A.last_name
FROM customer A
LEFT JOIN cust_order B //this is using a left join, but an inner may be appropriate also
ON (A.cust_id= B.Cust_id) //what links them together
GROUP BY A.cust_id; // the group by clause
As per your comment requesting some further info:
Left Join (right joins are almost identical, only the other way around):
The SQL LEFT JOIN returns all rows from the left table, even if there are no matches in the right table. This means that if the ON clause matches 0 (zero) records in right table, the join will still return a row in the result, but with NULL in each column from right table. ~Tutorials Point.
This means that a left join returns all the values from the left table, plus matched values from the right table or NULL in case of no matching join predicate.
LEFT joins will be used in the cases where you wish to retrieve all the data from the table in the left hand side, and only data from the right that match.
Execution Time
While the accepted answer in this case may work well in small datasets, it may however become 'heavy' in larger databases. This is because it was not actually designed for this type of operation.
This was the purpose of Joins to be introduced.
Much work in database-systems has aimed at efficient implementation of joins, because relational systems commonly call for joins, yet face difficulties in optimising their efficient execution. The problem arises because inner joins operate both commutatively and associatively. ~Wikipedia
In practice, this means that the user merely supplies the list of tables for joining and the join conditions to use, and the database system has the task of determining the most efficient way to perform the operation. A query optimizer determines how to execute a query containing joins. So, by allowing the dbms to choose the way your data is queried, you can save a lot of time.
Other Joins/Summary
AN INNER JOIN will return data from both tables where the keys in each table match
A LEFT JOIN or RIGHT JOIN will return all the rows from one table and matching data from the other table.
Use a join when you want to query multiple tables.
Joins are much faster than other ways of querying >=2 tables (speed can be seen much better on larger datasets).
You could try this one:
SELECT COUNT(cus_order.order_id), cus.cust_id, cus.first_name, cus.last_name
FROM cust_order cus_order, customer cus
WHERE cus_order.cust_id = cus.cust_id
GROUP BY cust_id;
Maybe an left join will help you
SELECT COUNT(order_id), cus.cust_id, cus.first_name, cus.last_name ]
FROM customer cus
LEFT JOIN cust_order co
ON (co.cust_id= cus.Cust_id )
GROUP BY cus.cust_id;

Selecting all records plus earliest date from many-to-many relationship

I've got two tables in a mysql database of hikes and peaks:
hikes: HikeID, Date, Name, Route, ...
peaks: PeakID, Name, Altitude, ...
Both are linked in a many-to-many relationship by a table called 'hp_links'. What I want to get is a list of all peaks, and against each one the earliest date it was climbed.
I came up with the following:
SELECT peaks.PeakID, peaks.Name, MIN(hikes.Date) AS FirstClimbed
FROM peaks
INNER JOIN hp_links ON peaks.PeakID = hp_links.PeakID
INNER JOIN hikes ON hp_links.HikeID = hikes.HikeID
GROUP BY peaks.PeakID
It does work, however it doesn't include peaks which don't have any entries in the link table (ie. haven't been climbed). I changed the first INNER JOIN (to 'hp_links') to a LEFT JOIN, but this didn't seem to make any difference. I then changed the second INNER JOIN (to 'hikes') to a RIGHT JOIN. This made a difference in that I got an additional record which consisted of peaks.PeakID = NULL, peaks.Name = NULL, and FirstClimbed = the date of a hike which had no peaks linked anyway.
Does anyone know the solution to this?
I think both joins should be left joins. Otherwise the second inner join will not include peaks with no hp_links.

MySQL one to many data relationship with added complications

I have a database in which there are multiple posts. Each post can be associated with one or more location. Each location is then associated with one country.
This is handled through four tables:
post (with the id and post_title)
postlocation (with the fields post_id and location_id - to allow a one to many relationship)
location (with the fields id, location_title and country_id)
country (with the fields, id and country_title)
I want to perform a simple, effective select to retrieve a list of posts and each one's associated locations and each of those locations' country.
I'm at a loss as to how to best achieve this, and any help would be most welcome. Thank you.
Use LEFT JOIN:
SELECT post.*, location.*, country.*
FROM post
LEFT JOIN postlocation ON post.id = postlocation.post_id
LEFT JOIN location ON postlocation.location_id = location.id
LEFT JOIN country ON location.country_id = country.id
Here's an explanation of how LEFT JOIN works: http://www.mysqltutorial.org/mysql-left-join.aspx
The MySQL LEFT JOIN clause works like this: when a row from the left
table matches a row from the right table based on join_condition, the
row’s content are selected as an output row. When row in the left
table has no match it is still selected for output, but combined with
a “fake” row from the right table that contains NULL in all columns.
In short, the MySQL LEFT JOIN clause allows you to select all rows
from the left table even there is no match for them in the right
table.
When you have multiple LEFT JOINs, then in each case it uses the cumulative results so far as the "left" table and the table your are joining on as the "right" table.
So the query above will return one row for every post/location/country. Note that this means there will be potentially several rows with the same post.* data (one for each postlocation associated with taht post).
And if a post has no postlocations associated with it, that post will still show up in the results (but with null rows for location.* and country.*). Similarly, if a location has no country associated it with it, the post/location rows will still show up in the output (but with null rows for country.*). This is the advantage of LEFT JOIN -- you always get all the rows from the table on the "left".

Please explain MySQL Joins in simple language

Please explain to me joins in simple language. Please do not post a web link as I need to read how a developer understand it, not an author.
Best I can point you to is A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins.
The diagrams helped me a lot.
Adding the main diagrams from the linked post here.
Inner Join
Inner join produces only the set of records that match in both Table A and Table B.
Full outer join
Full outer join produces the set of all records in Table A and Table B, with matching records from both sides where available. If there is no match, the missing side will contain null.
Left outer join
Left outer join produces a complete set of records from Table A, with the matching records (where available) in Table B. If there is no match, the right side will contain null.
Given Table Person And Information
SELECT *
FROM Person INNER JOIN
Information ON Person.ID = Information.ID
Will only return rows from both tables where both tables have the same IDs. So only if the ID exists in both Person and Information will the row be returned.
SELECT *
FROM Person LEFT JOIN
Information ON Person.ID = Information.ID
Will return all rows from Person, and only those that match from Information, where it does not match, it will return NULLs
SELECT *
FROM Person LEFT JOIN
Information ON Person.ID = Information.ID
WHERE Information.ID IS NULL
Will return all rows from Person that DOES NOT HAVE an entry in Information. This shows you the list of persons that do not have their Informaton updated yet.
I'm interpreting your question to mean joins in a very general sense, not each type of join, so if this is off the mark then I apologize:
Basically, joins enable you to get data from multiple tables in a single query by adding columns to your result set. So if you had the following tables:
Books (ID, Title, AuthorID)
Authors (ID, Name)
You could get a result set that looked like this:
Book | Author
'The Sirens of Titan' | 'Kurt Vonnegut'
'The Old Man and the Sea' | 'Earnest Hemingway'
By joining the two tables together like so:
select Books.Title as Book, Authors.Name as Author
from Books
inner join Authors on Authors.ID = Books.AuthorID
An inner join is the simplest type of join; it may be difficult to understand the point of outer joins without first having a strong grasp of inner joins and their uses.