I have a MySql table containing stock quotes (stock_symbol, quote_date, open_price, high_price, low_price, close_price) and need to find out various max and min values: Max High/Min Low over 10/20/245/252 days.
I know how to do this using a SELECT query for each period:
SELECT max(high_price), min(low_price) FROM mytable WHERE stock_symbol = 'GOOG' ORDER BY quote_date DESC LIMIT 10;
Can it be done using a single SELECT statement without making the query too intense for the database server? Would a single SELECT statement perform better than multiple SELECT statements?
Any thoughts/help would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Do it preferably in one statement, but the problem is only on the indexes : be sure to have an index on all columns for which you ask the min and the max or that you add in the where clause : hight_price, low_price and stock_symbol.
With indexes, this request will be instantaneous, even for very big tables and without your LIMIT 10
Don't put an ORDER BY in this query : it's useless as the min and max are the same independently of the order you look at the set.
Your query should be simply
SELECT max(high_price), min(low_price) FROM mytable WHERE stock_symbol = 'GOOG'
How to create an index : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-index.html
I sort the rows on date. If I want to select every row that has a unique value in the last column, can I do this with sql?
So I would like to select the first row, second one, third one not, fourth one I do want to select, and so on.
What you want are not unique rows, but rather one per group. This can be done by taking the MIN(pk_artikel_Id) and GROUP BY fk_artikel_bron. This method uses an IN subquery to get the first pk_artikel_id and its associated fk_artikel_bron for each unique fk_artikel_bron and then uses that to get the remaining columns in the outer query.
SELECT * FROM tbl
WHERE pk_artikel_id IN
(SELECT MIN(pk_artikel_id) AS id FROM tbl GROUP BY fk_artikel_bron)
Although MySQL would permit you to add the rest of the columns in the SELECT list initially, avoiding the IN subquery, that isn't really portable to other RDBMS systems. This method is a little more generic.
It can also be done with a JOIN against the subquery, which may or may not be faster. Hard to say without benchmarking it.
SELECT *
FROM tbl
JOIN (
SELECT
fk_artikel_bron,
MIN(pk_artikel_id) AS id
FROM tbl
GROUP BY fk_artikel_bron) mins ON tbl.pk_artikel_id = mins.id
This is similar to Michael's answer, but does it with a self-join instead of a subquery. Try it out to see how it performs:
SELECT * from tbl t1
LEFT JOIN tbl t2
ON t2.fk_artikel_bron = t1.fk_artikel_bron
AND t2.pk_artikel_id < t1.pk_artikel_id
WHERE t2.pk_artikel_id IS NULL
If you have the right indexes, this type of join often out performs subqueries (since derived tables don't use indexes).
This non-standard, mysql-only trick will select the first row encountered for each value of pk_artikel_bron.
select *
...
group by pk_artikel_bron
Like it or not, this query produces the output asked for.
Edited
I seem to be getting hammered here, so here's the disclaimer:
This only works for mysql 5+
Although the mysql specification says the row returned using this technique is not predictable (ie you could get any row as the "first" encountered), in fact in all cases I've ever seen, you'll get the first row as per the order selected, so to get a predictable row that works in practice (but may not work in future releases but probably will), select from an ordered result:
select * from (
select *
...
order by pk_artikel_id) x
group by pk_artikel_bron
I'm trying to find the sum of values in a particular column for the last ten rows selected by some criteria and ordered by some column. I tried the obvious:
SELECT SUM(column) AS abc FROM table WHERE criteria ORDER BY column DESC LIMIT 10
However this seems to sum the entire column!?
So after playing around this seems to work:
SELECT SUM(column) AS abc FROM (SELECT column FROM table WHERE criteria ORDER BY column DESC LIMIT 10) AS abc
My questions...
Why doesn't the more intuitive approach work?
I could access the result by using $data[0], but I prefer to have some meaningful variable. So why do I need to do AS abc twice?
Is there a tidier/better way to do the job?
I'm quite inexperienced with SQL queries so I would really appreciate any help.
Because mysql runs query in the following order:
FROM->WHERE->GROUP BY->HAVING->ORDER BY->LIMIT.
So limit will be applied after grouping and will filter groups but not ordinary rows.
Regarding abs twice: it's necessary to add alias for all derived queries. This is mysql rule.
I have seen many queries with something as follows.
Select 1
From table
What does this 1 mean, how will it be executed and, what will it return?
Also, in what type of scenarios, can this be used?
select 1 from table will return the constant 1 for every row of the table. It's useful when you want to cheaply determine if record matches your where clause and/or join.
SELECT 1 FROM TABLE_NAME means, "Return 1 from the table". It is pretty unremarkable on its own, so normally it will be used with WHERE and often EXISTS (as #gbn notes, this is not necessarily best practice, it is, however, common enough to be noted, even if it isn't really meaningful (that said, I will use it because others use it and it is "more obvious" immediately. Of course, that might be a viscous chicken vs. egg issue, but I don't generally dwell)).
SELECT * FROM TABLE1 T1 WHERE EXISTS (
SELECT 1 FROM TABLE2 T2 WHERE T1.ID= T2.ID
);
Basically, the above will return everything from table 1 which has a corresponding ID from table 2. (This is a contrived example, obviously, but I believe it conveys the idea. Personally, I would probably do the above as SELECT * FROM TABLE1 T1 WHERE ID IN (SELECT ID FROM TABLE2); as I view that as FAR more explicit to the reader unless there were a circumstantially compelling reason not to).
EDIT
There actually is one case which I forgot about until just now. In the case where you are trying to determine existence of a value in the database from an outside language, sometimes SELECT 1 FROM TABLE_NAME will be used. This does not offer significant benefit over selecting an individual column, but, depending on implementation, it may offer substantial gains over doing a SELECT *, simply because it is often the case that the more columns that the DB returns to a language, the larger the data structure, which in turn mean that more time will be taken.
If you mean something like
SELECT * FROM AnotherTable
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM table WHERE...)
then it's a myth that the 1 is better than
SELECT * FROM AnotherTable
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM table WHERE...)
The 1 or * in the EXISTS is ignored and you can write this as per Page 191 of the ANSI SQL 1992 Standard:
SELECT * FROM AnotherTable
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1/0 FROM table WHERE...)
it does what it says - it will always return the integer 1. It's used to check whether a record matching your where clause exists.
select 1 from table is used by some databases as a query to test a connection to see if it's alive, often used when retrieving or returning a connection to / from a connection pool.
The result is 1 for every record in the table.
To be slightly more specific, you would use this to do
SELECT 1 FROM MyUserTable WHERE user_id = 33487
instead of doing
SELECT * FROM MyUserTable WHERE user_id = 33487
because you don't care about looking at the results. Asking for the number 1 is very easy for the database (since it doesn't have to do any look-ups).
Although it is not widely known, a query can have a HAVING clause without a GROUP BY clause.
In such circumstances, the HAVING clause is applied to the entire set. Clearly, the SELECT clause cannot refer to any column, otherwise you would (correct) get the error, "Column is invalid in select because it is not contained in the GROUP BY" etc.
Therefore, a literal value must be used (because SQL doesn't allow a resultset with zero columns -- why?!) and the literal value 1 (INTEGER) is commonly used: if the HAVING clause evaluates TRUE then the resultset will be one row with one column showing the value 1, otherwise you get the empty set.
Example: to find whether a column has more than one distinct value:
SELECT 1
FROM tableA
HAVING MIN(colA) < MAX(colA);
If you don't know there exist any data in your table or not, you can use following query:
SELECT cons_value FROM table_name;
For an Example:
SELECT 1 FROM employee;
It will return a column which contains the total number of rows & all rows have the same constant value 1 (for this time it returns 1 for all rows);
If there is no row in your table it will return nothing.
So, we use this SQL query to know if there is any data in the table & the number of rows indicates how many rows exist in this table.
If you just want to check a true or false based on the WHERE clause, select 1 from table where condition is the cheapest way.
This means that You want a value "1" as output or Most of the time used as Inner Queries because for some reason you want to calculate the outer queries based on the result of inner queries.. not all the time you use 1 but you have some specific values...
This will statically gives you output as value 1.
I see it is always used in SQL injection,such as:
www.urlxxxxx.com/xxxx.asp?id=99 union select 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 from database;
These numbers can be used to guess where the database exists and guess the column name of the database you specified.And the values of the tables.
it simple means that you are retrieving the number first column from table ,,,,means
select Emply_num,Empl_no From Employees ;
here you are using select 1 from Employees;
that means you are retrieving the Emply_num column.
Thanks
The reason is another one, at least for MySQL. This is from the MySQL manual
InnoDB computes index cardinality values for a table the first time that table is accessed after startup, instead of storing such values in the table. This step can take significant time on systems that partition the data into many tables. Since this overhead only applies to the initial table open operation, to “warm up” a table for later use, access it immediately after startup by issuing a statement such as SELECT 1 FROM tbl_name LIMIT 1
This is just used for convenience with IF EXISTS(). Otherwise you can go with
select * from [table_name]
Image In the case of 'IF EXISTS', we just need know that any row with specified condition exists or not doesn't matter what is content of row.
select 1 from Users
above example code, returns no. of rows equals to no. of users with 1 in single column
What is the best way to query a database with a large set of up to 500 comparisons per row.
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column = x OR column = y OR column = z OR ...(x500)
I estimate that the table could grow to up to thousands of entries in the short term.
Thanks
Use WHERE column IN(x,y,z...)
If you are doing a few... say less than 20 or so, you could use an IN (....) clause. However, if you are doing something that will normally span 100's or 1000's on a regular basis, I would use a temp table of just "columnX" values and insert into that all the possible values... then query a join using this temp table as basis to the other...
select YT.*
from
JustValuesTable JVT
Join YourTable YT
ON JVT.ColumnX = YT.ColumnX
rest of query...
maybe you can use the in clause ..
select * from table where column in ('asdf', 'aqwer' .....)
additional, you may want to create a view, containing your allowed values, and then
select * from table where column in (select your_field_name from your_view)
You may be better off using an IN query:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column IN (x, y, z)
That would make it a little more readable at least and I think should improve performance.
How about using the IN function?