Microsoft SQL server select statements on multiple tables? - sql

Question

so I've been struggling with some of the select statements on multiple tables:
Employee table
Employee_ID
First_Name
Last_Name
Assignment table
Assignment_ID
Employee_ID
Host_Country_arrival_Date
Host_Country_departure_Date
Scheduled_End_Date
I'm being asked to display query to display employee full name, number of days between the host country arrival date and host country departure date, number of days between today's date and the assignment scheduled end date and the results sorted according to host country arrival date with the oldest date on top.
also, I'm not familiar with the sort function in SQL server..
Here's my query and I've been getting syntax errors:
SELECT
First_Name
Last_Name
FROM Employee
SELECT
Host_Country_Arrival_Date
Host_Country_Departure_Date
FROM Assignment;

Answer 1

So, Basically what your code is doing is 2 different queries. The first getting all the employees names, and the second one getting the dates of the assignments.
What you'll want to do here is take advantage of the relationship between the tables using a JOIN. That is basically saying "Give me all employees and all of HIS/HERS assignments". So, for each assignment that the employee has, it will bring a row in the result with his name and the assignment info.
To get the difference between days you use DATEDIFF passing 3 parameters, the timespan in which to calculate the difference, the first and the second date. It will then Subtract the first one from the second one and give you the result in the selected timespan.
And finnaly the sorting: Just add 'ORDER BY' followed by each column that you want to use for ordering and then specify if you want it ascending (ASC) or descending (DESC).
You can check how I would answer the if that question was proposed to me in a coding challenge.
SELECT
CONCAT(E.First_Name,' ', E.Last_Name) FullName,
DATEDIFF(DAY,Scheduled_End_Date,getdate()) DaysTillScheduledDate,
DATEDIFF(DAY,Host_Country_Arrival_Date,Host_Country_Departure_Date) DaysTillScheduledDate
FROM Employee As E --Is nice to add aliases
Inner Join
Assignment As A
on E.Employee_ID = A.Employee_ID -- Read a little bit about joins, there are a lot of material availabel an its going to be really necessary moving forward with SQL
order by Host_Country_Arrival_Date DESC -- Just put the field that you want to order by here, desc indicates that it should be descending

Answer 2

You should use a JOIN to link the tables together on Employee_ID:
SELECT
First_Name,
Last_Name,
Host_Country_Arrival_Date,
Host_Country_Departure_Date
FROM Employee
JOIN Assignment ON Assignment.Employee_ID = Employee.Employee_ID;
What this is saying basically is that for each employee, go out to the assignments table and add the assignments for that employee. If there are multiple assignments, the employee columns will be repeated on each row with the assignment columns for the assignment.

Answer 3

You need to look for the join and group by. Please find this link for reference tutorial
For now you may try this...
SELECT
CONCAT(Emp.First_Name,' ', Emp.Last_Name) FullName,
DATEDIFF(DAY,Scheduled_End_Date,getdate()) DaysTillScheduledDate,
DATEDIFF(DAY,Host_Country_Arrival_Date,Host_Country_Departure_Date) DaysTillScheduledDate
FROM Employee As Emp Inner Join Assignment As Assign on Emp.Employee_ID = Assign.Employee_ID
order by Host_Country_Arrival_Date DESC