I'm trying to build an SSRS report where the dataset is "presented" to SSRS through the application (Microsoft Dynamics NAV2009). The concept of the report is simple - it's a list of pieces of equipment - computers, cellphones, etc. The table has a "related to equipment" field. So Equipment ID "CELL01" may have a "Related to equipment ID" = "Computer 123". And Equipment ID "CAR456" may also have a "Related to equipment ID" = "Computer 123".
I want to create a report that lists each piece of equipment, and below it, any "related equipment". Many of the pieces have no related pieces, so the listing needs to look like this:
COMPUTER001 Dell Latitude 4mb RAM
COMPUTER002 Dell Latitude 16mb RAM
COMPUTER123 Dell Latitude 8mb RAM
Related Equipment
CELL01 Nokia Cellphone
CAR456 2011 Ford Taurus
COMPUTER135 Sony Laptop 12gb RAM
CELL01 Nokia Cellphone
CAR456 2011 Ford Taurus
Note that the "related items" is only unidirectional - the related items need only to be reported under the "Related to" equipment, and not vice-versa.
I have done some due diligence and investigated recursive hierarchies. It appears that this method depends on every "child" having a "parent". In my case, most "children" are "NULL", i.e. most equipment does not have a "related to equipment" id. So if I try to create the list from the bottom up and use recursive hierarchies, in the example below, only the COMPUTER123 and its children would be listed. None of the the other "Parent" records (e.g. COMPUTER001) have any children.
Has anyone done an SSRS report similar to this? In "Pure" SQL, this would be akin to having a query using a left outer join, and listing the fields in the primary record even if the JOIN'ed results were NULL, e.g. a list of all salesmen with their orders booked for the week:
Select s.Name, i.Invoice_No, i.Invoice_Amt
from Salesperson s
LEFT OUTER JOIN Invoice i on
s.SalespersonID = i.SalespersonID
If Salesperson "Joe" didn't make any sales this week, but Salesperson "Sam" made 3 sales and Salesperson "Bruno" made 2 sales, You might expect a result something like this:
Name Invoice_No Invoice_Amt
Bruno 1287 200.00
Bruno 1289 400.00
Joe NULL NULL
Sam 1281 65.00
Sam 1283 450.00
Sam 1286 175.00
So how would you construct a Report where the output would be:
Bruno
Invoices:
1287 200.00
1289 400.00
Joe
Sam
Invoices:
1281 65.00
1283 450.00
1286 175.00
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Ron
Related
Here's my situation : I have a table that has large amounts of records, I need to pull out a number of these records for each name in the database, note that TOP will not work for my use case. My end user wants the report formatted in such a way that each user shows up only once, and up to 3 different dates are shown for the user.
Table format
AutoID
Enum
TNum
Date
Comments
1
25
18
2/2/22
2
25
18
1/2/21
Blah
3
18
18
1/2/21
4
18
18
1/2/20
5
25
17
1/2/22
6
25
17
1/2/20
Now the Enum and TNum fields are fk with other tables, I have created a join that pulls the correct information from the other tables. In the end my query provides this output
RecordID
Training
CompletedDate
FirstName
LastName
Location
2821
MaP
1/1/21
David
Simpson
123 Sesame St.
2822
1/2/22
Fuller
MaP
Dough
GHI
David
123 Sesame St.
2825
1/1/20
Simpson
The two "Blank fields" represent information that is pulled and may or may not be needed in some future report.
So to my question : How do I manage to get a report, with this query's pull to look like this:
Place
LastName
FirstName
Training
FirstCuttoff
Secondcutoff
ThirdCutoff
Comments
123 Sesame St.
David
Simpson
MaP
1/1/20
1/1/21
123 Sesame St.
John
Dough
MaP
1/1/22
I was originally planning on joining my query to itself using where clauses. But when I tried that it just added two extra columns of the same date. In addition it is possible that each record is not identical; locations may be different but since the report needs the most recent location and the name of the trainee. In addition, to add more complexity, there are a number of people in the company with effectively the same name as far as the database is concerned, so rejoining on the name is out. I did pull the Enum in my query, I can join on that if needed.
Is there an easier way to do this, or do I need to sort out a multiple self-joining query?
I have a project I am working on where I am going to have to do this. Some of the suggestions I received were to use a Pivot query. It wouldn't work in my case but it might for yours. Here is a good example
Pivot Columns
Hello Stack overflow (and anyone googling similar questions in the future)!
I have a dataset that regularly reports which products are absent on a warehouse stockcheck, which I am trying to use to analyse when stock is or isn’t available. I’m essentially trying to identify “Has a part been reported as missing? -> If so, count the number of days it is missing until another part in the same category is reported as missing, but the original part was not reported as missing on that date (as we can assume it’s back in stock)”.
I’ve managed to make this work in excel, but my spreadsheet began to die from the calculation of 5 locations worth of categories and parts, let alone across the 600+ I’m working on! As a result, I’m trying to set up a similar function in Access to analyse which, and for how long, parts were out of stock.
My dataset looks something like:
Location number
Location
Category
Date reported
Part Number
Part Description
Order number
1
London
Car
03/06/2021
2021
Wheel A
1
2
London
Bus
03/06/2021
1491
Seat C
2
3
Manchester
Car
01/06/2021
2021
Wheel A
3
My assumptions are that:-
• My data is fed by individual workers who each cover a location, and check all stock for a random selection of categories each visit (with the idea that they cover all of their location’s categories within a certain number of visits) and record which parts are missing. There is no particular visit plan – it can be a random number of days between each visit. This data gets fed into a central table, which I have access to.
• As my workers may not check all categories in a location on each visit, I must assume that a previously reported missing part is OOS until they check products in the same category, but do not report that part again.
I made this work on excel by setting up another column that concatenated my location, part number, and date reported, and then set up three tables (all of which are essentially locations, categories, and parts down my X axis, and dates across the Y axis):-
• Table1, to look if my concatenated code was reported for each day (and if so, output 1 – essentially working in days) – essentially, was each part reported as missing for each category and location?
• Table2, to look if any parts were reported for each category, for each location – essentially, how many parts were reported for each category for each location, and a value greater than 0 means we can assume that that category at that location has been checked by my workers for that date.
• Table3, that for each location+category+day asked as a formula – IF(category was checked as per table2 = yes , pull the value of 1 for that part/location/category in table 1 , re-use yesterday’s value for this part/location/day in this table). For the 1st day in my date range, I used the values for table1 for that day as a “starting up” point.
When I look at table 3, I can visually the run of days products were out of stock, and can from there crunch numbers related to that, which is what I want!
My initial Access plan was to set up three crosstab queries, to mirror my three excel tables. I can make Table1 and Table2 very easily, but for the life of me can’t make table3 work (currently have a calculated expression that mirrors the formula I had in table 3, but something has gone amiss…).
I’m looking for a steer/advice on setting up the expression in my crosstab query, or other ideas/approaches I could use to calculate how long each part is missing for. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I’ve lost my mind going in circles today!
Edit:-
Simplified dataset I'm working with:-
Location
Category
Date Reported
Part number
Part Description
Order number
Concatenate code
Concatenate Code 2
1
London
Car
03/06/2021
2021
Wheel
1
1443502021
1
London
Bus
03/06/2021
1491
Seat
2
1443501491
2
Manchester
Car
05/06/2021
2021
Wheel
3
2443522021
1
London
Car
05/06/2021
2021
Wheel
4
1443522021
1
London
Car
07/06/2021
2021
Wheel
5
1443542021
1
London
Bus
05/06/2021
1860
Seatbelt
6
1443521860
1
London
Bus
05/06/2021
1860
Seatbelt
7
1443521860
2
manchester
Bus
01/06/2021
1860
Seatbelt
8
2443481860
2
Manchester
Bus
06/06/2021
1860
Seatbelt
9
2443531860
2
manchester
Bus
04/06/2021
1491
Seat
10
2443511491
2
Manchester
Bus
06/06/2021
1491
Seat
11
2443531491
I'm trying to output something like (which I've made work in Excel):-
Location
Category
Part code
01/06/2021
02/06/2021
03/06/2021
04/06/2021
05/06/2021
06/06/2021
07/06/2021
1
London
Car
2021
1
1
1
1
1
London
Car
2626
1
London
Bus
1491
1
1
1
London
Bus
1860
1
1
2
Manchester
Car
2021
1
1
2
Manchester
Car
2626
2
Manchester
Bus
1491
1
1
1
2
Manchester
Bus
1860
1
1
1
1
3
Liverpool
Car
2021
3
Liverpool
Car
2626
3
Liverpool
Bus
1491
Or to return the value for how many concurrent days out of stock a part has been, like per day of this version:-
Location
Category
Part code
01/06/2021
02/06/2021
03/06/2021
04/06/2021
05/06/2021
06/06/2021
07/06/2021
1
London
Car
2021
1
2
3
4
1
London
Car
2626
1
London
Bus
1491
1
2
1
London
Bus
1860
1
2
2
Manchester
Car
2021
1
2
2
Manchester
Car
2626
2
Manchester
Bus
1491
1
2
3
2
Manchester
Bus
1860
1
2
3
1
3
Liverpool
Car
2021
3
Liverpool
Car
2626
3
Liverpool
Bus
1491
My Access sql (that I then turned into a crosstab) to identify ordered parts per day:
SELECT DISTINCT T_stores.[Store Nos], T_stores.[Store Name], t_Stands.Brand, t_Productlookup.TPND, t_Productlookup.TITLE, t_gapdata.Quantity, t_gapdata.[Requested Date]
FROM ((T_stores
INNER JOIN t_Stands ON T_stores.[Store Nos] = t_Stands.[Store Nos])
INNER JOIN t_gapdata ON (t_Stands.[Brand] = t_gapdata.[Brand]) AND (t_Stands.[Store Nos] = t_gapdata.[Store No]))
INNER JOIN t_Productlookup ON t_gapdata.[Part Number] = t_Productlookup.[EAN];
And likewise, to identfy is parts were ordered for a location's category:-
SELECT DISTINCT T_stores.[Store Nos], T_stores.[Store Name], t_Stands.Brand, t_Productlookup.TPND, t_Productlookup.TITLE, t_gapdata.Quantity, t_gapdata.[Requested Date]
FROM ((T_stores
INNER JOIN t_Stands ON T_stores.[Store Nos] = t_Stands.[Store Nos])
INNER JOIN t_gapdata ON (t_Stands.[Brand] = t_gapdata.[Brand]) AND (t_Stands.[Store Nos] = t_gapdata.[Store No]))
INNER JOIN t_Productlookup ON t_gapdata.[Part Number] = t_Productlookup.[EAN];
These first two work fine, but I'm struggling to put them together with some sort of Iif calculated field for a third query:-
SELECT First(q_gaps_per_product.[Store Nos]) AS [FirstOfStore Nos], First(q_gaps_per_product.[Store Name]) AS [FirstOfStore Name], First(q_gaps_per_product.Brand) AS FirstOfBrand, First(q_gaps_per_brand_store.[Order Id]) AS [FirstOfOrder Id], First(q_gaps_per_product.TPND) AS FirstOfTPND, First(q_gaps_per_product.TITLE) AS FirstOfTITLE, First(q_gaps_per_product.[Requested Date]) AS [FirstOfRequested Date], First(IIf([q_gaps_per_brand_store]![Requested Date]>=[q_gaps_per_product]![Requested Date],[Quantity],"PREVIOUS DAY")) AS Expr1, [q_gaps_per_product]![Store Nos] & [q_gaps_per_product]![Quantity] & [q_gaps_per_product]![TPND] AS Expr2
FROM q_gaps_per_product LEFT JOIN q_gaps_per_brand_store ON q_gaps_per_product.[Brand] = q_gaps_per_brand_store.[Brand]
GROUP BY [q_gaps_per_product]![Store Nos] & [q_gaps_per_product]![Quantity] & [q_gaps_per_product]![TPND];
Expr1 is supposed to be how many days a product is out of stock, with the idea that "PREVIOUS DAY" would return the same criteria for the previous day, to show either running gaps or that a product was in fact available as a 0, but I haven't got that far yet.
Expr2 is basically something I tried to make up to group the results by, as I had an insane number of results due to my janky table relationships.
I sort of think this query is DOA, and I need to go back to the drawing board to reproduce something like my Excel tables / how many days out of stock products have been concurrently out of stock before.
Sorry for the sheer storm of words!
I am designing a database, and I would like to know;
Can I answer this question with queries, how much skill employees earned from this trainings?
Is this a good structure to do it?
how much money spent per department
how much skill earned per employee
how much skill earned per department
id session_name Skill impact sugg dept function training_value training no
1 PHP Software 3 Sales 2 100usd 1
2 PHP Software 3 Finance 2 100usd 1
3 PHP communication 2 Sales 2 100usd 1
4 PHP communication 2 Finance 2 100usd 1
5 ASP Software 4 Sales 2 200usd 2
6 ASP Software 4 Finance 2 200usd 2
7 ASP database 1 Sales 2 200usd 2
8 ASP database 1 Finance 2 200usd 2
attended training table
id student_id training_no
1 1 1
1 1 2
student table
id name department
1 John 1
2 Mary 2
department table
id name
1 sales
2 finance
In the end I need to find skills for each student
john
software 7
communication 2
database 1
total spent
john 300 usd
total spent by department
sales 300 usd
Your schema looks OK to me.
You should, however, think about entities and relationships.
Your entities seem to be trainings, people, and departments.
You have a many:many relationship for people:trainings. That's good.
You have a one:many relationship for departments:people. That's also good.
It looks like you want some kind of relationship for trainings:departments. I'm guessing here, but you have a sugg dept column in your trainings table. Is that supposed to have a direct relationship to your departments table?
Do you actually need an extra entity called "attendance" rather than just a many-to-many relationship people:trainings. Do you want to record when a person did a training? Do you want to record how much that particular attendance cost? How about what marks they received if there was a quiz?
In that case, you'll want relationships where each person has zero or more attendances, each attendance has exactly one training, and each training has zero or more attendances.
My point: do the hard work of thinking through your entities and relationships, and the result will be a good design for your tables.
If I may put it another way: What part of the real world are you trying to capture in your data base? What's valuable in the real world that you want your data base to hold? In your application ...
Students are people. They are, umm, inherently valuable and persistent entities.
Trainings represent the labor and cost of creating them and presenting them.
Attendances represent the effort of students.
Departments probably pay the bill for attendances. They certainly represent power centers in your application.
What other items of value exist in this corner of the real world? Teachers? Managers? Venues (classrooms)? Equipment? Customers?
My point is, figure out your entities -- the items of value -- and the relationships between them. Then write your table definitions.
I'm trying to retrieve data from tables and combine multiple rows into a single column, without repeating any information.
I have the following tables: profile, qualification, projects.
Profile
pro_id surname firstname
------ ------- ----------
1 John James
2 King Fred
3 Luxury-Yachts Raymond
Qualification
pro_id Degree School Year
------ ------ ------ -----
1 MBA Wharton university 2002
1 LLB Yale University 2001
2 BSc Covington University 1998
2 BEd Kellog University 1995
Projects
pro_id Title Year
------ ------ ------
1 Social Networking 2003
1 Excavation of aquatic debris 2007
2 Design of solar radios 1992
2 Development of expert systems 2011
I want to retrieve the all of the information for each person, with each person appearing only once in the result. The info on qualifications and projects should each be in their own column (one column for qualifications, another for projects), separated by commas. For example, the results for the above sample data should be:
1 John James MBA Wharton university 2002, LLB Yale University 2001 Social Networking 2003, Excavation of aquatic debris 2007, Design of Solar panels 2008
2 King Fred BSc Covington University 1998, BEd Kellog University 1995, Msc MIT 2011 Design of solar radios 1992, Development of expert systems 2011
3 Raymond Luxury-Yachts
Currently, I have the query:
SELECT pro_id,
surname,
firstname,
group_concat(degree,school,year) AS qual,
concat(Title,year) AS work
FROM profile,
LEFT JOIN qualification
ON qualification.pro_id = profile.pro_id
JOIN projects
ON projects.pro_id = profile.pro_id
GROUP BY pro_id
For the sample data, this query results in:
1 John James MBA Wharton university 2002, Social Networking 2003
1 John James LLB Yale University 2001, Excavation of aquatic debris 2007
1 John James MBA Wharton university 2002, Social Networking 2003, Excavation of aquatic debris 2007
etc
Note: Raymond Luxury-Yachts isn't present in the current result.
I don't want duplicate result records. Also if the surname does not have any entry in the qualification and projects table, I want the query to return the name and display an empty field in the qualification and projects table instead of omitting them altogether.
Replace LEFT JOIN with JOIN
Select pro_id, surname, firstname, group_concat(degree,school,year) as qual,concat(Title,year) as work
from profile
join qualification on qualification.pro_id = profile.pro_id
join projects on projects.pro_id = profile.pro_id group by pro_id
What is the difference between "INNER JOIN" and "OUTER JOIN"?
Using Join will fix the issue with displaying values even if there are no records in the projects table.
For the first question, you can try making a stored function and calling it from the select statement. This function will take pro_id as parameter, create the concatenated string and return it. That's the only solution for MySQL that I can think of at the moment.
I think you are close on your thoughts of group_concat. However, with possible No values (thus leaving nulls), can cause problems. I would have each secondary table pre-concatinated by person's ID and join to THAT result. Eliminates the problem of nulls
SELECT
p.pro_id,
p.surname,
p.firstname,
PreQConcat.UserQual,
PrePJConcat.UserWork
FROM
profile p
LEFT JOIN
( select q.pro_id,
group_concat( q.degree, q.school, q.year) AS UserQual
from
qualification q
group by
q.pro_id ) PreQConcat
ON p.Pro_ID = PreQConcat.pro_id
LEFT JOIN
( select pj.pro_id,
concat(pj.Title, pj.year) AS UserWork
from
projects pj
group by
pj.pro_id ) PrePJConcat
ON p.Pro_ID = PrePJConcat.pro_id
You are going through all people anyhow, and want all their respective elements (when they exist) grouped, so why group on a possibility it doesn't exist. Let the JOINED queries run once each, complete with a single result grouped by only those people it had data for, then join back to the original profile person.
QUESTION: Is it okay to have "shortcut" identifiers in a table so that I don't have to do a long string of joins to get the information I need?
To understand what I'm talking about, I'm going to have to lay ouf an example here that looks pretty complicated but I've simplified the problem quite a bit here, and it should be easily understood (I hope).
The basic setup: A "company" can be an "affiliate", a "client" or both. Each "company" can have multiple "contacts", some of which can be "users" with log in privileges.
`Company` table
----------------------------------------------
ID Company_Name Address
-- ----------------------- -----------------
1 Acme, Inc. 101 Sierra Vista
2 Spacely Space Sprockets East Mars Colony
3 Cogswell Cogs West Mars Colony
4 Stark Industries Los Angeles, CA
We have four companies in our database.
`Affiliates` table
---------------------
ID Company_ID Price Sales
-- ---------- ----- -----
1 1 50 456
2 4 50 222
3 1 75 14
Each company can have multiple affiliate id's so that they can represent the products at different pricing levels to different markets.
Two of our companies are affiliates (Acme, Inc. and Stark Industries), and Acme has two affiliate ID's
`Clients` table
--------------------------------------
ID Company_ID Referring_affiliate_id
-- ---------- ----------------------
1 2 1
2 3 1
3 4 3
Each company can only be a client once.
Three of our companies are clients (Spacely Space Sprockets, Cogswell Cogs, and Stark Industries, who is also an affiliate)
In all three cases, they were referred to us by Acme, Inc., using one of their two affiliate ID's
`Contacts` table
-----------------------------------------
ID Name Email
-- -------------- ---------------------
1 Wylie Coyote wcoyote#acme.com
2 Cosmo Spacely boss#spacely.com
3 H. G. Cogswell ceo#cogs.com
4 Tony Stark tony#stark.com
5 Homer Simpson simpson#burnscorp.com
Each company has at least one contact, but in this table, there is no indication of which company each contact works for, and there's also an extra contact (#5). We'll get to that in a moment.
Each of these contacts may or may not have a login account on the system.
`Contacts_type` table
--------------------------------------
contact_id company_id contact_type
---------- ---------- --------------
1 1 Administrative
2 2 Administrative
3 3 Administrative
4 4 Administrative
5 1 Technical
4 2 Technical
Associates a contact with one or more companies.
Each contact is associated with a company, and in addition, contact 5 (Homer Simpson) is a technical contact for Acme, Inc, and contact 4 (Tony Stark) is a both an administrative contact for company 4 (Stark Industries) and a technical contact for company 3 (Cogswell Cogs)
`Users` table
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ID contact_id company_id client_id affiliate_id user_id password access_level
-- ---------- ---------- --------- ------------ -------- -------- ------------
1 1 1 1 1 wylie A03BA951 2
2 2 2 2 NULL cosmo BF16DA77 3
3 3 3 3 NULL cogswell 39F56ACD 3
4 4 4 4 2 ironman DFA9301A 2
The users table is essentially a list of contacts that are allowed to login to the system.
Zero or one user per contact; one contact per user.
Contact 1 (Wylie Coyote) works for company 1 (Acme) and is a customer (1) and also an affiliate (1)
Contact 2 (Cosmo Spacely) works for company 2 (Spacely Space Sprockets) and is a customer (2) but not an affiliate
etc...
NOW finally onto the problem, if there is one...
Do I have a circular reference via the client_id and affiliate_id columns in the Users table? Is this a bad thing? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this.
When someone logs in, it checks their credentials against the users table and uses users.contact_id, users.client_id, and users.affiliate_id to do a quick look up rather than having to join together a string of tables to find out the same information. But this causes duplication of data.
Without client_id in the users table, I would have to find the following information out like this:
affiliate_id: join `users`.`contact_id` to `contacts_types`.`company_id` to `affiliates`.`company_id`
client_id: join `users`.`contact_id` to `contacts_types`.`company_id` to `clients`.`company_id`
company_id: join `users`.`contact_id` to `contacts_types`.`company_id` to `company`.`company_id`
user's name: join `users`.`contact_id` to `contacts_types`.`contact_id` to `contacts`.`contact_id` > `name`
In each case, I wouldn't necessarily know if the user even has an entry in the affiliate table or the clients table, because they likely have an entry in only one of those tables and not both.
Is it better to do these kinds of joins and thread through multiple tables to get the information I want, or is it better to have a "shortcut" field to get me the information I want?
I have a feeling that over all, this is overly complicated in some way, but I don't see how.
I'm using MySQL.
it's better to do the joins. you should only be denormalizing your data when you have timed evidence of a slow response.
having said that, there are various ways to reduce the amount of typing:
use "as" to give shorter names to your fields
create views. these are "virtual tables" that already have your standard joins built-in, so that you don't have to repeat that stuff every time.
use "with" in sql. this lets you define something like a view within a single query.
it's possible mysql doesn't support all the above - you'll need to check the docs [update: ok, recent mysql seems to support views, but not "with". so you can add views to do the work of affiliate_id, client_id etc and treat them just like tables in your queries, but keeping the underlying data nicely organised.]