(This is a general SQL question, but I am specifically using MSAccess 2010 so looking for how to do this with Access' flavor of SQL)
I have a table called offices which has id, office_name, num_desks.
Another table called employees which has id, employee_name.
And a final table called employee_offices which has id, office_id, employee_id.
I can assign employees to offices via employee_offices.
I am trying to generate a report which shows all offices and the employees assigned to the, but also includes blank lines for any empty desks in that office.
I realize a "simple" way to do this would be to create a desks table with id, office_id, delete the num_desks column from the offices table and change employee_offices to something like employee_desks. Then my report would be a simple LEFT OUTER JOIN and it would include all the unassigned desks. However for the sake of sanity (in this case, there is no contextual difference between desks), I am not going to do this. Plus if I start deleting desks I have referential constraints to deal with (which obviously exist for a good reason and would catch the fact that I am leaving employees without a desk), but I just want to be able to change the number of desks.
I can calculate the number of empty desks (or lack of desks) through the following command:
SELECT
office_id,
num_desks - num_employees AS desk_diff,
MAX(0, num_desks - num_employees) AS blank_rows_to_add
FROM offices LEFT OUTER JOIN (
SELECT office_id, COUNT(employee_id) AS num_employees
FROM employee_offices
GROUP BY office_Id
) AS num_employees_by_office ON offices.id = num_employees_by_office.office_id
Is there a way to take this number (blank_rows_to_add) and somehow utilze it to add that many blank rows (or at least the row only has the office_id/office_name) to a report showing a list of employees by office? I know this can be done with VBA but I am specifically looking for an SQL method that also doesn't include a temp table if at all possible.
Thank you.
Related
I have two tables in a Database
and
I need to retrieve the number of staff per manager in the following format
I've been trying to adapt an answer to another question
SELECT bankNo AS "Bank Number",
COUNT (*) AS "Total Branches"
FROM BankBranch
GROUP BY bankNo
As
SELECT COUNT (*) AS StaffCount ,
Employee.Name AS Name
FROM Employee, Stafflink
GROUP BY Name
As I look at the Group BY I'm thinking I should be grouping by The ManID in the Stafflink Table.
My output with this query looks like this
So it is counting correctly but as you can see it's far off the output I need to get.
Any advice would be appreciated.
You need to join the Employee and Stafflink tables. It appears that your FROM clause should look like this:
FROM Employee INNER JOIN StaffLink ON Employee.ID = StaffLink.ManID
You have to join the Eployee table twice to get the summary of employees under manager
select count(*) as StaffCount,Manager.Name
from Employee join Stafflink on employee.Id = StaffLink.EmpId
join Employee as Manager on StaffLink.ManId = Manager.Id
Group by Manager.Name
The answers that advise you on how to join are correct, assuming that you want to learn how to use SQL in MS Access. But there is a way to accomplish the same thing using the ACCESS GUI for designing queries, and this involves a shorter learning curve than learning SQL.
The key to using the GUI when more than one table is involved is to realize that you have to define the relationships between tables in the relationship manager. Once you do that, designing the query you are after is a piece of cake, just point and click.
The tricky thing in your case is that there are two relationships between the two tables. One relationship links EmpId to ID and the other links ManId to ID.
If, however, you want to learn SQL, then this shortcut will be a digression.
If you don't specify a join between the tables, a so called Cartesian product will be built, i.e., each record from one table will be paired with every record from the other table. If you have 7 records in one table and 10 in the other you will get 70 pairs (i.e. rows) before grouping. This explains why you are getting a count of 7 per manager name.
Besides joining the tables, I would suggest you to group on the manager id instead of the manager name. The manager id is known to be unique per manager, but not the name. This then requires you to either group on the name in addition, because the name is in the select list or to apply an aggregate function on the name. Each additional grouping slows down the query; therefore I prefer the aggregate function.
SELECT
COUNT(*) AS StaffCount,
FIRST(Manager.Name) AS ManagerName
FROM
Stafflink
INNER JOIN Employee AS Manager
ON StaffLink.ManId = Manager.Id
GROUP BY
StaffLink.ManId
I don't know if it makes a performance difference, but I prefer to group on StaffLink.ManId than on Employee.Id, since StaffLink is the main table here and Employee is just used as lookup table in this query.
I am pulling reports for my company and am needing to pull a specific report that I am having trouble with. We are using SQL Server 2012 and I am pulling the SQL reports.
What I need is to pull a simple report:
Group Name, List of Members in the group; Supervisor of the group.
However, the problem is that the supervisor as well as the members and the group name all come from one table in order to get the relevant information. Currently here is my SQL code below:
Use DATABASE
go
-- This is the select portion deciding the columns needed.
select
C.group_name
,C2.first_name
,C2.last_name
-- These are the tables that the query is pulling from.
FROM db..groups AS G
LEFT OUTER JOIN db..contact AS C
ON G.group_id=C.contact_id
INNER JOIN db..contact AS C2
ON G.member=C2.contact_id
go
This pulls the first portion:
The group name, then the first name of a member in that group, and then the last name of a member in that group.
However, I am having trouble getting the supervisor portion. This portion uses the table db.contact under the column supervisor_id as a foreign key. The supervisor_id uses the same unique id as the normal contact_id, but in the same table. Some contact_ids have supervisor_id's that are other contact_id's from the same table, hence the foreign key.
How can I make it so I can get the contact_id that is equal to the supervisor_id of the contact_id that is equal to the group_id?
Taking a quick stab at this while we wait for details
You know you need groups and I'm assuming you don't care about Groups that have no members. Thus Groups INNER JOINed to Contact. This generates your direct group membership. To get the supervisor, you then need to factor in the Supervisor on the specific Contact row.
You might not have a boss, or your boss might be yourself. It's always interesting to see how various HR systems record this. In my example, I'm assuming the head reports to no one instead of themselves.
SELECT
G.group_name
, C.first_name
, C.last_name
-- this may produce nulls depending on outer vs inner join below
, CS.first_name AS supervisor_first_name
, CS.last_name AS supervisor_last_name
FROM
dbo.Groups AS G
INNER JOIN
dbo.Contact AS C
ON C.contact_id = G.member
LEFT OUTER JOIN
dbo.Contact AS CS
ON CS.contact_id = C.supervisor_id;
Depending on how exactly you wanted that data reported, there are various tricks we could use to report that data. In particular, GROUPING SETS might come in handy.
SQLFiddle
My table IncomingLetter has a foreign key to a table Department, which has an ID and a column Short_Name.
I'm using this query to count the incoming letters assigned to a department.
SELECT COUNT(DocumentNumber) AS TotalNumberIncomingLetters
FROM IncomingLetter
WHERE Assigned_To_Department=1;
Whereas this works I want to make a query based upon the short name and not based upon the ID.
SELECT COUNT(DocumentNumber) AS TotalNumberIncomingLetters
FROM IncomingLetter
WHERE Assigned_To_Department.Short_Name="My Department Name";
This does not work, whereas I found examples that are using this syntax. However, it is probably important to notice, that I m using this query in MS access.
You should use
SELECT COUNT(il.DocumentNumber) AS TotalNumberIncomingLetters
FROM IncomingLetter il
INNER JOIN Department d on d.ID = il.Assigned_To_Department
WHERE d.Short_Name="My Department Name";
The "My Department Name" text is actually stored in the Departments table, and only the number (1) is stored in the IncomingLetter table, in the field Assigned_To_Department.
Asking for Assigned_To_Department.Short_Name basically asks the number 1 to get it's Short_Name field, that does not make sense.
You need to tell the database engine two things in these scenarios:
which tables are connected - IncomingLetter and Departments in this case (the inner join part)
how they are connected - by setting their Assigned_To_Department and ID fields respecively (the on ... part
I am learning how to create view using SQL server. I am trying to add a view called Managers in the Northwind database that shows only employees that supervise other employees. This is what I have so far.
Create View Manager_vw
As
Select LastName,
FirstName,
EmployeeID
From Employees
Where
What I am stuck on is how and I going to put in supervise other employees. I am not to sure how to do this. If someone can help me understand how to do this.
In northwind.dbo.employees you would find employees who supervise other employees by looking the reportsto column. Basically you want to return employees whose id is in the reportsto column in another row. That can be done like this:
SELECT LastName,
FirstName,
EmployeeID
FROM employees E
WHERE EXISTS(SELECT * FROM Employees WHERE reportsTo = E.EmployeeID)
The EXISTS is like a JOIN but is usually implemented as a "semi-join" which will stop processing after it finds a singe match (rather than finding all the subordinate employees which would take extra work) Because it doesn't return any additional records, you also save the cost of the additional step to eliminate duplicates (a JOIN would do more work to process the join, and even more work to undo the work that wasn't necessary by doing a DISTINCT.)
You'll notice that I reference E.EmployeeID in the subquery, which relates the subquery to the outer query, this is called a Correlated Subquery.
A word of caution: Views have their place in a DB but can easily be misused. When an engineer comes to the database from an OO background, views seem like a convenient way to promote inheritance and reusability of code. Often people eventually find themselves in a position where they have nested views joined to nested views of nested views. SQL processes nested views by essentially taking the definition of each individual view and expanding that into a beast of a query that will make your DBA cry.
Also, you followed excellent practice in your example and I encourage you to continue this. You specified all your columns individually, never ever use SELECT * to specify the results of your view. It will, eventually, ruin your day. You'll see I do have a SELECT * in my EXISTS clause but EXISTS does not return a resultset and the optimizer will ignore that in that specific case.
Here's another option:
SELECT DISTINCT manager_tbl.*
FROM Employees AS staff_tbl
JOIN Employees AS manager_tbl
ON staff_tbl.ReportsTo = manager_tbl.EmployeeID
Adapted from this site. There are a number of example queries there that you might find interesting and useful.
Notes:
Using the DISTINCT keyword because a single manager could have more than one direct report. DISTINCT will omit the repetition caused by such a one-to-many relationship.
The Employees table in the Northwind database is an example of a hierarchical relationship modeled in a single table.
All together:
CREATE VIEW Manager_vw
AS
SELECT DISTINCT manager_tbl.*
FROM Employees AS staff_tbl
JOIN Employees AS manager_tbl
ON staff_tbl.ReportsTo = manager_tbl.EmployeeID
Where are Cartesian Joins used in real life?
Can some one please give examples of such a Join in any SQL database.
just random example. you have a table of cities: Id, Lat, Lon, Name. You want to show user table of distances from one city to another. You will write something like
SELECT c1.Name, c2.Name, SQRT( (c1.Lat - c2.Lat) * (c1.Lat - c2.Lat) + (c1.Lon - c2.Lon)*(c1.Lon - c2.Lon))
FROM City c1, c2
Here are two examples:
To create multiple copies of an invoice or other document you can populate a temporary table with names of the copies, then cartesian join that table to the actual invoice records. The result set will contain one record for each copy of the invoice, including the "name" of the copy to print in a bar at the top or bottom of the page or as a watermark. Using this technique the program can provide the user with checkboxes letting them choose what copies to print, or even allow them to print "special copies" in which the user inputs the copy name.
CREATE TEMP TABLE tDocCopies (CopyName TEXT(20))
INSERT INTO tDocCopies (CopyName) VALUES ('Customer Copy')
INSERT INTO tDocCopies (CopyName) VALUES ('Office Copy')
...
INSERT INTO tDocCopies (CopyName) VALUES ('File Copy')
SELECT * FROM InvoiceInfo, tDocCopies WHERE InvoiceDate = TODAY()
To create a calendar matrix, with one record per person per day, cartesian join the people table to another table containing all days in a week, month, or year.
SELECT People.PeopleID, People.Name, CalDates.CalDate
FROM People, CalDates
I've noticed this being done to try to deliberately slow down the system either to perform a stress test or an excuse for missing development deliverables.
Usually, to generate a superset for the reports.
In PosgreSQL:
SELECT COALESCE(SUM(sales), 0)
FROM generate_series(1, 12) month
CROSS JOIN
department d
LEFT JOIN
sales s
ON s.department = d.id
AND s.month = month
GROUP BY
d.id, month
This is the only time in my life that I've found a legitimate use for a Cartesian product.
At the last company I worked at, there was a report that was requested on a quarterly basis to determine what FAQs were used at each geographic region for a national website we worked on.
Our database described geographic regions (markets) by a tuple (4, x), where 4 represented a level number in a hierarchy, and x represented a unique marketId.
Each FAQ is identified by an FaqId, and each association to an FAQ is defined by the composite key marketId tuple and FaqId. The associations are set through an admin application, but given that there are 1000 FAQs in the system and 120 markets, it was a hassle to set initial associations whenever a new FAQ was created. So, we created a default market selection, and overrode a marketId tuple of (-1,-1) to represent this.
Back to the report - the report needed to show every FAQ question/answer and the markets that displayed this FAQ in a 2D matrix (we used an Excel spreadsheet). I found that the easiest way to associate each FAQ to each market in the default market selection case was with this query, unioning the exploded result with all other direct FAQ-market associations.
The Faq2LevelDefault table holds all of the markets that are defined as being in the default selection (I believe it was just a list of marketIds).
SELECT FaqId, fld.LevelId, 1 [Exists]
FROM Faq2Levels fl
CROSS JOIN Faq2LevelDefault fld
WHERE fl.LevelId=-1 and fl.LevelNumber=-1 and fld.LevelNumber=4
UNION
SELECT Faqid, LevelId, 1 [Exists] from Faq2Levels WHERE LevelNumber=4
You might want to create a report using all of the possible combinations from two lookup tables, in order to create a report with a value for every possible result.
Consider bug tracking: you've got one table for severity and another for priority and you want to show the counts for each combination. You might end up with something like this:
select severity_name, priority_name, count(*)
from (select severity_id, severity_name,
priority_id, priority_name
from severity, priority) sp
left outer join
errors e
on e.severity_id = sp.severity_id
and e.priority_id = sp.priority_id
group by severity_name, priority_name
In this case, the cartesian join between severity and priority provides a master list that you can create the later outer join against.
When running a query for each date in a given range. For example, for a website, you might want to know for each day, how many users were active in the last N days. You could run a query for each day in a loop, but it's simplest to keep all the logic in the same query, and in some cases the DB can optimize the Cartesian join away.
To create a list of related words in text mining, using similarity functions, e.g. Edit Distance