SQL querying multiple tables for information - mysql

I have a little dilemma in joining data from 4 tables in one SQL query, I am using MySQL for the DB part and would appriciate any help you can give me.
Here is the task...
I have for tables with columns and data
Sale Items Owner Salesman
-------------- ----------- ----------- --------------
*Salesman_id Item_type *Owner_id *Salesman_id
*Owner_id Item_color Owner_name Salesman_name
Buyer_id *Owner_id
Price
I want to query these tables on the columns I have marked with emphases text. So I can get result like
Item type, Item color, Owner name, Salesman name, Salesman number.
I have gone through a countless number of iteration trying to achieve this both with JOIN and nested queries without sufficient result.

If there is a one-to-one relation you can use inner join
SELECT i.Item_type , i.Item_color ,o.Owner_name,sm.Salesman_name,sm.Salesman_id
FROM Salesman sm
INNER JOIN Sale s ON (s.Salesman_id = sm.Salesman_id )
INNER JOIN Owner o ON (s.Owner_id=o.Owner_id)
INNER JOIN Items i ON (i.Owner_id=o.Owner_id)
If there is one -to- many try with Left join

try this
SELECT Item_type, Item_color, Owner_name, Salesman_name, Sale.Salesman_id FROM Items
INNER JOIN Owner USING(Owner_id)
INNER JOIN Sale USING(Owner_id)
INNER JOIN Salesman ON Salesman.Salesman_id=Sale.Salesman_id
why doesn't the Items table have a primary key?

A solution when we're not joining, and you want it them to just display their values, you can do something like (I know this doesn't directly answer OP's question, but I'm getting there...)
SELECT sale.`salesman_id`,sale.`owner_id`,
items.`order_id`,
owner.`owner_id`,
salesman.`salesman_id`
FROM `Sale` sale,
`Items` items,
`Owner` owner,
`Salesman` salesman
And that should return everything.
However, your question states that we are joining. Could you put some data into something like SQLFiddle so I have some visual representation? and a brief summary of what you're trying to accomplish - as in where you want the joins?

Related

MySQL inner join query select from same table multiple times

I believe I have formed this question title correctly because I wasn't sure how to form it. As an example, I have summarized my query below.
I have an order table which saves order details like customer id, address and product ids and quantity ordered for each order in a row. So multiple inventory/product ids are saved in a single row.
so my query looks like: this is a summarized query for an easier explanation I have omitted various other fields.
SELECT customer.name,customer.address,tbl_order.order_date,tbl_order.product1_id,tbl_order.product2_id,inventory.product1_name,inventory.product2_name
FROM tbl_order
INNER JOIN customer ON tbl_order.customer_id = customer.id
INNER JOIN inventory on tbl_order.product1_id = inventory.id
INNER JOIN inventory on tbl_order.product2_id = inventory.id
where YEAR(tbl_order.order_date)='$year'
So my question is how to get the inventory details from the inventory table based on each product id from tbl_order. I am running a while loop to show all data for a year
while($row=mysqli_fetch_assoc($sql1))
I can divide this query into 2 and run the inventory query individually but then how to combine the while loop, as sometimes there could also be empty query when some products are not in order table (depending on order to order, not all products are ordered) so this doesn't work
while($row=mysqli_fetch_assoc($sql1)) and ($row1=mysqli_fetch_assoc($inv1)) and ($row2=mysqli_fetch_assoc($inv2))
and so one for 10 products
First, of all you have bad DB design and I kindly advice to normalize your DB.
Second, if you can not re-design the DB you can use multiple joins with aliases like:
SELECT
customer.name, customer.address, tbl_order.order_date,
tbl_order.product1_id, inv1.product1_name,
tbl_order.product2_id, inv2.product2_name
FROM tbl_order
INNER JOIN customer ON tbl_order.customer_id = customer.id
INNER JOIN inventory AS inv1 ON tbl_order.product1_id = inv1.id
INNER JOIN inventory AS inv2 ON tbl_order.product2_id = inv2.id
WHERE YEAR(tbl_order.order_date)='$year'

SELECT where no commissions

I have 2 tables.
account_receivables
commissions
account_receivables has many commissions
commissions has a foreign key towards account_receivables_id.
The way my application works is when account_receivables gets an insert it also calculates commissions for a group of sales reps, based on account_receivables.amount.
There were 2 months where it randomly missed 1 sales rep. So what I am try to do is find out all the account_receivables.id where commissions were missed.
Is there a straight SQL query for this? It is a Laravel app and I have tried the below with no luck:
$comms = DB::connection('mysqllocal')->table('commissions')
->select('account_receivables_id')
->whereNotIn('rep_group_number', [999999])
->groupBy('account_receivables_id')->get();
999999 being rep_group_number
Basically you are looking for all records from account_receivables that do not have a corresponding record in commissions.
A simple LEFT JOIN with a WHERE ... IS NULL should do it.
select ar.id
from account_receivables ar
left join commissions c on c.account_receivables_id = ar.id
where c.id is null
You did not give the full table structure in your question ; the above query assumes that the relation between both tables is as follows (adapt it if needed) :
commissions.account_receivables_id -> account_receivables.id

mySQL - How to do this query?

I'm trying to answer to the following query:
Select the first name and last name of the clients which rent films (that have DVD's) from all the categories, ordering by first name and last name.
Database consists in:
(better view - open in a new tab)
Inventory -> DVD's
Rental -> Rents customers did
Category table:
| category_id | int(10) unsigned | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| name | varchar(25) | YES | | NULL |
My doubt is in how to assign that a field from a query must contain all ids from another query (categories).
I mean I understand the fact we can natural join inventory with rental and film, and then find an id that fails on a single category, then we know he doesn't contain all... But I can't complete this.
I have this solution (But I can't understand it very well):
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer AS C WHERE NOT EXISTS
(SELECT * FROM category AS K WHERE NOT EXISTS
(SELECT * FROM (film NATURAL JOIN inventory) NATURAL JOIN rental
WHERE C.customer_id = customer_id AND K.category_id = category_id));
Are there any other solutions?
On our projects, we NEVER use NATURAL JOIN. That doesn't work for us, because the PRIMARY KEY is always a surrogate column named id, and the foreign key columns are always tablename_id.
A natural join would match id in one table to id in the other table, and that's not what we want. We also frequently have "housekeeping" columns in the tables that are named the same, such as version column used for optimistic locking pattern.
And even if our naming conventions were different, and the join columns were named the same, there would be a potential for a join in an existing query to change if we added a column to a table that was named the same as a column in another table.
And, reading SQL statement that includes a NATURAL JOIN, we can't see what columns are actually being matched, without running through the table definitions, looking for columns that are named the same. That seems to put an unnecessary burden on the reader of the statement. (A SQL statement is going to be "read" many more times than it's written... the author of the statement saving keystrokes isn't a beneficial tradeoff for ambiguity leading to extra work by future readers.
(I know others have different opinions on this topic. I'm sure that successful software can be written using the NATURAL JOIN pattern. I'm just not smart enough or good enough to work with that. I'll give significant weight to the opinions of DBAs that have years of experience with database modeling, implementing schemas, writing and tuning SQL, supporting operational systems, and dealing with evolving requirements and ongoing maintenance.)
Where was I... oh yes... back to regularly scheduled programming...
The image of the schema is way too small for me to decipher, and I can't seem to copy any text from it. Output from a SHOW CREATE TABLE is much easier to work with.
Did you have a SQL Fiddle setup?
I don't thin the query in the question will actually work. I thought there was a limitation on how far "up" a correlated subquery could reference an outer query.
To me, it looks like this predicate
WHERE C.customer_id = customer_id
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
is too deep. The subquery that's in isn't allowed to reference columns from C, that table is too high up. (Maybe I'm totally wrong about that; maybe it's Oracle or SQL Server or Teradata that has that restriction. Or maybe MySQL used to have that restriction, but a later version has lifted it.)
OTHER APPROACHES
As another approach, we could get each customer and a distinct list of every category that he's rented from.
Then, we could compare that list of "customer rented category" with a complete list of (distinct) category. One fairly easy way to do that would be to collapse each list into a "count" of distinct category, and then compare the counts. If a count for a customer is less than the total count, then we know he's not rented from every category. (There's a few caveats, We need to ensure that the customer "rented from category" list contains only categories in the total category list.)
Another approach would be to take a list of (distinct) customer, and perform a cross join (cartesian product) with every possible category. (WARNING: this could be fairly large set.)
With that set of "customer cross product category", we could then eliminate rows where the customer has rented from that category (probably using an anti-join pattern.)
That would leave us with a set of customers and the categories they haven't rented from.
OP hasn't setup a SQL Fiddle with tables and exemplar data; so, I'm not going to bother doing it either.
I would offer some example SQL statements, but the table definitions from the image are unusable; to demonstrate those statements actually working, I'd need some exemplar data in the tables.
(Again, I don't believe the statement in the question actually works. There's no demonstration that it does work.)
I'd be more inclined to test it myself, if it weren't for the NATURAL JOIN syntax. I'm not smart enough to figure that out, without usable table definitions.
If I worked on that, the first think I would do would be to re-write it to remove the NATURAL keyword, and add actual predicates in an actual ON clause, and qualify all of the column references.
And the query would end up looking something like this:
SELECT c.first_name
, c.last_name
FROM customer c
WHERE NOT EXISTS
( SELECT 1
FROM category k
WHERE NOT EXISTS
( SELECT 1
FROM film f
JOIN inventory i
ON i.film_id = f.film_id
JOIN rental r
ON r.inventory_id = i.inventory_id
WHERE f.category_id = k.category_id
AND r.customer_id = c.customer_id
)
)
(I think that reference to c.customer_id is too deep to be valid.)
EDIT
I stand corrected on my conjecture that the reference to C.customer_id was too many levels "deep". That query doesn't throw an error for me.
But it also doesn't seem to return the resultset that we're expecting, I may have screwed it up somehow. Oh well.
Here's an example of getting the "count of distinct rental category" for each customer (GROUP BY c.customer_id, just in case we have two customers with the same first and last names) and comparing to the count of category.
SELECT c.last_name
, c.first_name
FROM customer c
JOIN rental r
ON r.customer_id = c.customer_id
JOIN inventory i
ON i.inventory_id = r.inventory_id
JOIN film f
ON f.film_id = i.film_id
GROUP
BY c.last_name
, c.first_name
, c.customer_id
HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT f.category_id)
= (SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT a.category_id) FROM category a)
ORDER
BY c.last_name
, c.first_name
, c.customer_id
EDIT
And here's a demonstration of the other approach, generating a cartesian product of all customers and all categories (WARNING: do NOT do this on LARGE sets!), and find out if any of those rows don't have a match.
-- customers who have rented from EVERY category
-- h = cartesian (cross) product of all customers with all categories
-- g = all categories rented by each customer
-- perform outer join, return all rows from h and matching rows from g
-- if a row from h does not have a "matching" row found in g
-- columns from g will be null, test if any rows have null values from g
SELECT h.last_name
, h.first_name
FROM ( SELECT hi.customer_id
, hi.last_name
, hi.first_name
, hj.category_id
FROM customer hi
CROSS
JOIN category hj
) h
LEFT
JOIN ( SELECT c.customer_id
, f.category_id
FROM customer c
JOIN rental r
ON r.customer_id = c.customer_id
JOIN inventory i
ON i.inventory_id = r.inventory_id
JOIN film f
ON f.film_id = i.film_id
GROUP
BY c.customer_id
, f.category_id
) g
ON g.customer_id = h.customer_id
AND g.category_id = h.category_id
GROUP
BY h.last_name
, h.first_name
, h.customer_id
HAVING MIN(g.category_id IS NOT NULL)
ORDER
BY h.last_name
, h.first_name
, h.customer_id
I will take a stab at this, only because I am curious why the answer proposed seems so complex. First, a couple of questions.
So your question is: "Select the first name and last name of the clients which rent films (that have DVD's) from all the categories, ordering by first name and last name."
So, just go through the rental database, joining customer. I am not sure what the category part has anything to do with this, as you are not selecting or displaying any category, so that does not need to be part of the search, it is implied as when they rent a DVD, that DVD has a category.
SELECT C.first_name, C.last_name
FROM customer as C JOIN rental as R
ON (C.customer_id = R.customer_id)
WHERE R.return_date IS NOT NULL;
So, you are looking for movies that are currently rented, and displaying the first and last names of customers with active rentals.
You can also do some UNIQUE to reduce the number of duplicate customers that show up in the list.
Does this help?!

MYSQL - A little bit of trouble/confusion with join query

I am trying to put together a mysql query, that links 3 tables together. In essence, the tables are as follows:
products - Contains product information and basic pricing.
product_depts - Linking table that links products to different departments.
promotions - Another linking table, links promotion periods and prices based on product id.
This is the query:
SELECT p.id, `desc` , price1, price2, cost1, taxable, quantity, deptId, sale
FROM products p
INNER JOIN product_depts ON p.id = prodId
INNER JOIN promotions s ON p.id = s.id
WHERE MATCH (
`desc`
)
AGAINST (
'CLOVER'
IN BOOLEAN
MODE
)
ORDER BY `desc`
LIMIT 0 , 30
If the following line is removed:
INNER JOIN promotions s ON p.id = s.id
And sale taken out of the select clause,
What happens, is ALL the products with a description containing "CLOVER", in the products table, are returned.
With the addition of the removed query parts, only the items that are on promotion (have a matching id in the promotions table), are returned. And any additional products containing "CLOVER" in the products table, that are not "on promotion" are left out.
As I have very limited knowledge with mysql, I thought maybe someone that does have a great deal of knowledge on the matter to share... Would like to provide some input with this.
As i understand it though, this would be essentially the same thing as calling deptId from the product_depts table, which works perfectly. So it is confusing me.
What am i doing wrong that only the items that are "on promotion" are displayed and the additional results are left out?
Thank you!
INNER joins basically say "retrieve all records where there's a matching record in BOTH tables".
If I'm reading your question correctly, it sounds like what you'd want is a LEFT or RIGHT join, which translates to "retrieve all records from one table, and (if any) matching records from the other table.
Sounds like you want to get all products, whether they have a promotion or not, but if they do have a promotion, retrieve the promo info as well.
That'd be
SELECT ...
FROM products
INNER JOIN product_depts ON ...
LEFT JOIN promotions ON ...
So... all products MUST have a department, so do an inner join for that particular part of the query. The left join on promotions makes the 'products' table be the LEFT table, so all records from that table are fetched. The promotions table becomes the RIGHT table, and only provides data for the query results if there's a matching record in the promotions table.
So... given 2 products, 1 of which is on sale, you'd get
product #1 department #1 promoinfo #1
product #2 department #2 NULL
for results. Since there's no matching promo information for the #2 product, you get NULL for the promo data.

When to use a left outer join?

I don't understand the concept of a left outer join, a right outer join, or indeed why we need to use a join at all! The question I am struggling with and the table I am working from is here: Link
Question 3(b)
Construct a command in SQL to solve the following query, explaining why it had to employ the
(outer) join method. [5 Marks]
“Find the name of each staff member and his/her dependent spouse, if any”
Question 3(c) -
Construct a command in SQL to solve the following query, using (i) the join method, and (ii) the
subquery method. [10 Marks]
“Find the identity name of each staff member who has worked more than 20 hours on the
Computerization Project”
Can anyone please explain this to me simply?
Joins are used to combine two related tables together.
In your example, you can combine the Employee table and the Department table, like so:
SELECT FNAME, LNAME, DNAME
FROM
EMPLOYEE INNER JOIN DEPARTMENT ON EMPLOYEE.DNO=DEPARTMENT.DNUMBER
This would result in a recordset like:
FNAME LNAME DNAME
----- ----- -----
John Smith Research
John Doe Administration
I used an INNER JOIN above. INNER JOINs combine two tables so that only records with matches in both tables are displayed, and they are joined in this case, on the department number (field DNO in Employee, DNUMBER in Department table).
LEFT JOINs allow you to combine two tables when you have records in the first table but might not have records in the second table. For example, let's say you want a list of all the employees, plus any dependents:
SELECT EMPLOYEE.FNAME as employee_first, EMPLOYEE.LNAME as employee_last, DEPENDENT.FNAME as dependent_last, DEPENDENT.LNAME as dependent_last
FROM
EMPLOYEE INNER JOIN DEPENDENT ON EMPLOYEE.SSN=DEPENDENT.ESSN
The problem here is that if an employee doesn't have a dependent, then their record won't show up at all -- because there's no matching record in the DEPENDENT table.
So, you use a left join which keeps all the data on the "left" (i.e. the first table) and pulls in any matching data on the "right" (the second table):
SELECT EMPLOYEE.FNAME as employee_first, EMPLOYEE.LNAME as employee_last, DEPENDENT.FNAME as dependent_first, DEPENDENT.LNAME as dependent_last
FROM
EMPLOYEE LEFT JOIN DEPENDENT ON EMPLOYEE.SSN=DEPENDENT.ESSN
Now we get all of the employee records. If there is no matching dependent(s) for a given employee, the dependent_first and dependent_last fields will be null.
example (not using your example tables :-)
I have a car rental company.
Table car
id: integer primary key autoincrement
licence_plate: varchar
purchase_date: date
Table customer
id: integer primary key autoincrement
name: varchar
Table rental
id: integer primary key autoincrement
car_id: integer
bike_id: integer
customer_id: integer
rental_date: date
Simple right? I have 10 records for cars because I have 10 cars.
I've been running this business for 10 years, so I've got 1000 customers.
And I rent the cars about 20x per year per cars = 10 years x 10 cars x 20 = 2000 rentals.
If I store everything in one big table I've got 10x1000x2000 = 20 million records.
If I store it in 3 tables I've got 10+1000+2000 = 3010 records.
That's 3 orders of magnitude, so that's why I use 3 tables.
But because I use 3 tables (to save space and time) I have to use joins in order to get the data out again
(at least if I want names and licence plates instead of numbers).
Using inner joins
All rentals for customer 345?
SELECT * FROM customer
INNER JOIN rental on (rental.customer_id = customer.id)
INNER JOIN car on (car.id = rental.car_id)
WHERE customer.id = 345.
That's an INNER JOIN, because we only want to know about cars linked to rentals linked to customers that actually happened.
Notice that we also have a bike_id, linking to the bike table, which is pretty similar to the car table but different.
How would we get all bike + car rentals for customer 345.
We can try and do this
SELECT * FROM customer
INNER JOIN rental on (rental.customer_id = customer.id)
INNER JOIN car on (car.id = rental.car_id)
INNER JOIN bike on (bike.id = rental.bike_id)
WHERE customer.id = 345.
But that will give an empty set!!
This is because a rental can either be a bike_rental OR a car_rental, but not both at the same time.
And the non-working inner join query will only give results for all rentals where we rent out both a bike and a car in the same transaction.
We are trying to get and boolean OR relationship using a boolean AND join.
Using outer joins
In order to solve this we need an outer join.
Let's solve it with left join
SELECT * FROM customer
INNER JOIN rental on (rental.customer_id = customer.id) <<-- link always
LEFT JOIN car on (car.id = rental.car_id) <<-- link half of the time
LEFT JOIN bike on (bike.id = rental.bike_id) <<-- link (other) 0.5 of the time.
WHERE customer.id = 345.
Look at it this way. An inner join is an AND and a left join is a OR as in the following pseudocode:
if a=1 AND a=2 then {this is always false, no result}
if a=1 OR a=2 then {this might be true or not}
If you create the tables and run the query you can see the result.
on terminology
A left join is the same as a left outer join.
A join with no extra prefixes is an inner join
There's also a full outer join. In 25 years of programming I've never used that.
Why Left join
Well there's two tables involved. In the example we linked
customer to rental with an inner join, in an inner join both tables must link so there is no difference between the left:customer table and the right:rental table.
The next link was a left join between left:rental and right:car. On the left side all rows must link and the right side they don't have to. This is why it's a left join
You use outer joins when you need all of the results from one of the join tables, whether there is a matching row in the other table or not.
I think Question 3(b) is confusing because its entire premise wrong: you don't have to use an outer join to "solve the query" e.g. consider this (following the style of syntax in the exam paper is probably wise):
SELECT FNAME, LNAME, DEPENDENT_NAME
FROM EMPLOYEE, DEPENDENT
WHERE SSN = ESSN
AND RELATIONSHIP = 'SPOUSE'
UNION
SELECT FNAME, LNAME, NULL
FROM EMPLOYEE
EXCEPT
SELECT FNAME, LNAME, DEPENDENT_NAME
FROM EMPLOYEE, DEPENDENT
WHERE SSN = ESSN
AND RELATIONSHIP = 'SPOUSE'
In general:
JOIN joints two tables together.
Use INNER JOIN when you wanna "look up", like look up detailed information of any specific column.
Use OUTER JOIN when you wanna "demonstrate", like list all the info of the 2 tables.