SQL query to find missing entries in - mysql

Question

I have a database in which I need to find some missing entries and fill them in.
I have a table called "menu", each restaurant has multiple dishes and each dish has 4 different language entries (actually 8 in the main database but for simplicity lets go with 4), I need to find out which dishes for a particular restaurant are missing any language entries.
select * from menu where restaurantid = 1
i get stuck there, something along the lines of where language 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 doesn't exist which is the complicated bit because I need to see the languages that exist in order to see the language that's missing because I can't display something that isn't there. I hope that makes sense?
In the example table below restaurant 2 dishid 2 is missing language 3, that's what i need to find.
+--------------+--------+----------+-----------+
| RestaurantID | DishID | DishName | Language |
+--------------+--------+----------+-----------+
| 1 | 1 | Soup | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | Soúp | 2 |
| 1 | 1 | Soupe | 3 |
| 1 | 1 | Soupa | 4 |
| 1 | 2 | Bread | 1 |
| 1 | 2 | Bréad | 2 |
| 1 | 2 | Breade | 3 |
| 1 | 1 | Breada | 4 |
| 2 | 1 | Dish1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | Dísh1 | 2 |
| 2 | 1 | Disha1 | 3 |
| 2 | 1 | Dishe1 | 4 |
| 2 | 2 | Dish2 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 | Dísh2 | 2 |
| 2 | 2 | Dishe2 | 4 |
+--------------+--------+----------+-----------+

Answer 1

An anti-join pattern is usually the most efficient, in terms of performance.
Your particular case is a little more tricky, in that you need to "generate" rows that are missing. If every (ResturantID,DishID) should have 4 rows, with Language values of 1,2,3 and 4, we can generate that set of all rows with a CROSS JOIN operation.
The next step is to apply an anti-join... a LEFT OUTER JOIN to the rows that exist in the menu table, so we get all the rows from the CROSS JOIN set, along with matching rows.
The "trick" is to use a predicate in the WHERE clause that filters out rows where we found a match, so we are left rows that didn't have a match.
(It seems a bit strange at first, but once you get your brain wrapped around the anti-join pattern, it becomes familiar.)
So a query of this form should return the specified result set.
SELECT d.RestaurantID
, d.DishID
, lang.id AS missing_language
FROM (SELECT 1 AS id UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4
) lang
CROSS
JOIN (SELECT e.RestaurantID, e.DishID
FROM menu e
GROUP BY e.RestaurantID, e.DishID
) d
LEFT
JOIN menu m
ON m.RestaurantID = d.RestaurantID
AND m.DishID = d.DishID
AND m.Language = lang.id
WHERE m.RestaurantID IS NULL
ORDER BY 1,2,3
Let's unpack that bit.
First we get a set containing the numbers 1 thru 4.
Next we get a set containing the (RestaurantID, DishID) distinct tuples. (For each distinct Restaurant, a distinct list of DishID, as long as there is at least one row for any Language for that combination.)
We do a CROSS JOIN, matching every row from set one (lang) with every row from set (d), to generate a "complete" set of every (RestaurantID, DishID, Language) we want to have.
The next part is the anti-join... the left outer join to menu to find which of the rows from the "complete" set has a matching row in menu, and filtering out all the rows that had a match.
That may be a little confusing. If we think of that CROSS JOIN operation producing a temporary table that looks like the menu table, but containing all possible rows... we can think of it in terms of pseudocode:
create temporary table all_menu_rows (RestaurantID, MenuID, Language) ;
insert into all_menu_rows ... all possible rows, combinations ;
Then the anti-join pattern is a little easier to see:
SELECT r.RestaurantID
, r.DishID
, r.Language
FROM all_menu_rows r
LEFT
JOIN menu m
ON m.RestaurantID = r.RestaurantID
AND m.DishID = r.DishID
AND m.Language = r.Language
WHERE m.RestaurantID IS NULL
ORDER BY 1,2,3
(But we don't have to incur the extra overhead of creating and populating the temporary table, we can do that right in the query.)
Of course, this isn't the only approach. We could use a NOT EXISTS predicate instead of an anti-join, though this is not usually as efficient. The first part of the query is the same, to generate the "complete" set of rows we expect to have; what differs is how we identify whether or not there is a matching row in the menu table:
SELECT d.RestaurantID
, d.DishID
, lang.id AS missing_language
FROM (SELECT 1 AS id UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4
) lang
CROSS
JOIN (SELECT e.RestaurantID, e.DishID
FROM menu e
GROUP BY e.RestaurantID, e.DishID
) d
WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT 1
FROM menu m
WHERE m.RestaurantID = d.RestaurantID
AND m.DishID = d.DishID
AND m.Language = lang.id
)
ORDER BY 1,2,3
For each row in the "complete" set (generated by the CROSS JOIN operation), we're going to run a correlated subquery that checks whether a matching row is found. The NOT EXISTS predicate returns TRUE if no matching row is found. (This is a little easier to understand, but it usually doesn't perform as well as the anti-join pattern.)

Answer 2

You can use the following statement if each menu item should have a record on each language (8 in real life 4 in example). You can change the number 4 to 8 if you want to see all menu items per restaurant that doesn't have all 8 entries.
SELECT RestaurantID,DishID, COUNT( * )
FROM Menu
GROUP BY RestaurantID,DishID
HAVING COUNT( * ) <4