I am attempting to answer question #12 on sqlzoo.net
(http://sqlzoo.net/wiki/More_JOIN_operations). I couldn't figure out the answer on my own but I did manage to find the answer online.
12: Which were the busiest years for 'John Travolta', show the year and the number of movies he made each year for any year in which he made more than 2 movies.
Answer:
SELECT yr,COUNT(title) FROM
movie JOIN casting ON movie.id=movieid
JOIN actor ON actorid=actor.id
WHERE name='John Travolta'
GROUP BY yr
HAVING COUNT(title)=(SELECT MAX(c) FROM
(SELECT yr,COUNT(title) AS c FROM
movie JOIN casting ON movie.id=movieid
JOIN actor ON actorid=actor.id
WHERE name='John Travolta'
GROUP BY yr) AS t)
One of parts that I do not fully understand is the multiple joins:
FROM movie
JOIN casting ON movie.id=movieid
JOIN actor ON actorid=actor.id
Is Actor being joined only with Movie, or is actor being joined with Movie JOIN Casting?
I am trying to find a website that explains complex join statements as my attempted answer was far from correct (missing many sections). I think subselect statements with multiple complex join statements is a bit confusing at the moment. But, I could not find a good website that breaks the information up to help me form my own queries.
The other part I don't fully understand is this:
(SELECT yr,COUNT(title) AS c FROM
movie JOIN casting ON movie.id=movieid
JOIN actor ON actorid=actor.id
WHERE name='John Travolta'
GROUP BY yr) AS t)
3. What is the above code trying to find?
Ok, glad you are not afraid to ask, and I'll do my best to help clarify what is going on... Please excuse my re-formatting of the query to my mindset of writing queries. It better shows the relationships of where things are coming from (my perspective), and may help you too.
A few other things about my rewrite. I also like to use alias references to the tables so every column is qualified with the table (or alias) it originates from. It prevents ambiguity, especially for someone who does not know your table structures and relationships between tables. (m = alias to movie, c = alias for casting, a = alias for actor tables). For the sub query, and to keep alias confusion clear, I suffixed them with 2, such as m2, c2, a2.
SELECT
m.yr,
COUNT(m.title)
FROM
movie m
JOIN casting c
ON m.id = c.movieid
JOIN actor a
ON c.actorid = a.id
WHERE
a.name = 'John Travolta'
GROUP BY
m.yr
HAVING
COUNT(m.title) = ( SELECT MAX(t.movieCount)
FROM
( SELECT m2.yr,
COUNT(m2.title) AS movieCount
FROM
movie m2
JOIN casting c2
ON m2.id = c2.movieid
JOIN actor a2
ON c2.actorid = a2.id
WHERE
a2.name='John Travolta'
GROUP BY
m2.yr ) AS t
)
First, look at the outermost query (aliases m, c, a ) and the innermost query (aliases m2, c2, a2) are virtually identical.
The query has to run from the deepest query first... in this case the m2, c2, a2 query. Look at it and see what IT is going to deliver. If you ran that, you would get every year he had a movie and the number of movies... starting result from their sample data goes from 1976 all the way to 2010. So far, nothing complex unto itself (about 20 rows). Now, since each table may have an alias, each sub query (such as this MUST have an alias, so that is why the "as t". So, there is no true table, it is wrapping the entire query's result set and assigning THAT the alias of "t".
So now, go one level up in the query also wrapped in parens...
SELECT MAX(t.movieCount)
FROM (EntireSubquery as t)
Although abbreviated, this is what the engine is doing. Looking at the subquery result given an alias of "t" and finding the maximum "movieCount" value which is the count of movies that were done in a given year. In this case, the actual number is 3 and we are almost done.
Now, to the outermost query... again, this was virtually identical to the innermost query. The only difference is the HAVING clause. This is applied after all the grouping per year is performed. Then it is comparing ITs row result set count per year to the 3 value result of the SELECT MAX( t.movieCount )...
So, all the years that had only 1 or 2 movies are excluded from the result, and only the one year that had 3 movies are included.
Now, to clarify the JOINs. Each table should have a relationship with one or more tables (also known as linking tables, such as the cast table that has both a movie and actors/actresses. So, think of the join as how to I put the tables in order so that each one can touch a piece to the other until I have them all chained together. In this case
Movie -> Casting linked by the movie ID, then Casting -> actor by the actor ID, so that is how I do it visually hierarchically... I am starting FROM the Movie table, JOINing to the cast table based ON Movie ID = Cast Movie ID. Now, from the Casting table joined to the Actor table based on the common Actor ID field
FROM
movie m
JOIN casting c
ON m.id = c.movieid
JOIN actor a
ON c.actorid = a.id
Now, this is a simple relationship, but you COULD have one primary table with multiple child-level tables. You could join multiple tables based on the respective data. Very simple sample to clarify the point. You have a student table going to a school. A student has a degree major, an ethnicity, an address state (assuming an online school and students can be from any state). If you had lookup tables for degrees, ethnicity and states, you might come up with something like...
select
s.firstname,
s.lastname,
d.DegreeDescription,
e.ethnicityDescription,
st.stateName
from
students s
join degrees d
on s.degreemajor = d.degreeID
join ethnicity e
on s.ethnicityID = e.id
join states st
on s.homeState = st.stateID
Notice the hierarchical representation that each table is directly associated under that of the student. Not all tables need to be one deeper than the last.
So, there are many sites out there, such as the w3schools as offered by Mark, but learn to dissect small pieces at a time... what are the bare minimum tables to get from point-A to point-Z and draw the relationships. THEN, tare down based on requirement criteria you are looking for.
The correct answer would be:
SELECT yr, COUNT(title)
FROM movie m
JOIN casting c ON m.id=c.movieid JOIN actor a ON c.actorid=a.id
WHERE name='John Travolta'
GROUP BY yr
HAVING COUNT(title) > 2;
The answer you found (which seems to be a mistake on the sqlzoo site) is looking for any year that has a count equal to the year with the highest count.
I used table aliases in the query above to clear up how the tables are joined. Movie is joined to casting and casting is joined to actor.
The subquery that confuses you is listing each year and a count of movies for that year that star John Travolta. It's not needed if you're answering the question as written.
As for learning resources, make sure you have the basics down. Understand everything at http://w3schools.com/sql. Try searching for "sql joining multiple tables" in your favorite search engine when you're ready for more.
Related
I'm trying to simplify this SQL query (I replaced real table names with metaphorical), primarily get rid of the inner query, but I'm brain frozen can't think of any way to do it.
My major concern (aside from aesthetics) is performance under heavy loads
The purpose of the query is to count all books grouping by genre found on any particular shelve where the book is kept (hence the inner query which is effectively telling which shelve to count books on).
SELECT g.name, count(s.book_id) occurances FROM genre g
LEFT JOIN shelve s ON g.shelve_id=s.id
WHERE s.id=(SELECT genre_id FROM book WHERE id=111)
GROUP BY s.genre_id, g.name
It seems like you want to know many books that are on a shelf are in the same genre as book 111: if you liked book "X", we have this many similar books in stock.
One thing I noticed is the WHERE clause in the original required a value for the shelve table, effectively converting it to an INNER JOIN. And speaking of JOINs, you can JOIN instead of the nested select.
SELECT g.name, count(s.book_id) occurances
FROM genre g
INNER JOIN shelve s ON s.id = b.shelve_id
INNER JOIN book b on b.genre_id = s.id
WHERE b.id=111
GROUP BY g.id, g.name
Thinking about it more, I might also start with book rather than genre. In the end, the only reason you need the genre table at all is to find the name, and therefore matching to it by id may be more effective.
SELECT g.name, count(s.book_id) occurances
FROM book b
INNER JOIN shelve s ON s.id = b.genre_id
INNER JOIN genre g on g.shelve_id = s.id
WHERE b.id=111
GROUP BY g.id, g.name
Not sure they meet your idea of "simpler" or not, but they are alternatives.
... unless matching shelve.id with book.genre_id is a typo in the question. It seems very odd the two tables would share the same id values, in which case these will both be wrong.
I'm new to SQL and is doing some practice on sqlzoo (https://sqlzoo.net/wiki/More_JOIN_operations). Per one of its questions, my SQL statement is judged as wrong, but I think it is equivalent to the reference statement.
There are three tables. Details can be found on sqlzoo
This database features two entities (movies and actors) in a many-to-many relation. Each entity has its own table. A third table, casting , is used to link them. The relationship is many-to-many because each film features many actors and each actor has appeared in many films.
My statement
SELECT title, name
FROM casting JOIN movie ON movie.id=movieid
JOIN actor ON actor.id=actorid
WHERE movieid in
(SELECT id FROM movie WHERE yr=1962)
AND ord=1
The reference statement that produces right result
SELECT title, name
FROM movie JOIN casting ON (id=movieid)
JOIN actor ON (actor.id = actorid)
WHERE ord=1 AND yr = 1962
I cannot tell the difference between above two statements.
They should both work and produce the same results. But the reference statement is much more efficient.
So, I've a Uni assignment and the lecturer has picked this week to be ill and unable to answer questions.
We've been given a baseball database made up of 4 tables to work with. Table structures are as follows:
TABLENAME:(column1, column2...etc) PK = Primary Key, FK = Foreign Key
PLAYER:(num PK, name, dob, team FK, position)
GAME:(num PK, gamedate, hometeam FK, awayteam FK, homescore,
awayscore)
GAMESTAT:(gamenum PK, playernum FK, homeruns, strikeout)
TEAM:(code PK, name, town, ground)
The aim of this particularly question is to obtain the name of the stadium's (ground in team table), the sum of the home runs scored on that ground, the sum of the strikeouts and then the sum of these two values within a specified date range.
My query and issue are below:
SELECT
t.ground AS GROUNDPLAYED,
SUM(gs.homeruns) as TOTALHOMERUNS,
SUM(gs.strikeouts) AS TOTALSTRIKEOUTS,
SUM(gs.homeruns + gs.strikeouts) AS COMBINEDTOTAL
FROM team t
LEFT OUTER JOIN game g ON g.hometeam = t.code
LEFT OUTER JOIN gamestat gs ON g.num = gs.gamenum
WHERE g.gamedate BETWEEN '7-AUG-2014' AND '13-AUG-2014'
GROUP BY t.ground;
My problem lies in the fact that I get the correct values for games played but regardless of using the LEFT OUTER JOIN, I'm not getting all the stadium's to list. I'm convinced it has to do with the fact that I have had to join to the hometeam from the GAME table and it can only pick the home stadiums based on that.
Any help you may be able to offer would be much appreciated.
Move your WHERE clause to the ON clause for the join to gamestat.
By imposing the filter criteria in the WHERE clause, it occurs after the join has been performed, removing the stadiums with no activity. Once this predicate is moved to the appropriate ON clause it will filter the gamestat's before the join instead of after.
You have experienced the good fortune to encounter this important quirk of SQL, that the positioning of predicates affects the result-set, early in your education.
I find myself in a bit of an unworkable situation with a SQL query and I'm hoping that I'm missing something or might learn something new. The structure of the DB2 database I'm working with isn't exactly built for this sort of query, but I'm tasked with this...
Let's say we have Table People and Table Groups. Groups can contain multiple people, and one person can be part of multiple groups. Yeah, it's already messy. In any case, there are a couple of intermediary tables linking the two. The problem is that I need to start with a list of groups, get all of the people in those groups, and then get all of the groups with which the people are affiliated, which would be a superset of the initial group set. This would mean starting with groups, joining down to the people, and then going BACK and joining to the groups again. I need information from both tables in the result set, too, so that rules out a number of techniques.
I have to join this with a number of other tables for additional information and the query is getting enormous, cumbersome, and slow. I'm wondering if there's some way that I could start with People, join it to Groups, and then specify that if a person has one group that is in the supplied set of groups (which is done via a subquery), then ALL groups for that person should be returned. I don't know of a way to make this happen, but I'm thinking (hoping) that there's a relatively clean way to make this happen in SQL.
A quick and dirty example:
SELECT ...
FROM GROUPS g
JOIN LINKING_A a
ON g.GROUPID = a.GROUPID
AND GROUPID IN (subquery)
JOIN LINKING_B b
ON a.GROUPLIST = b.GROUPLIST
JOIN PEOPLE p
ON b.PERSONID = p.PERSONID
--This gets me all people affiliated with groups,
-- but now I need all groups affiliated with those people...
JOIN LINKING_B b2
ON p.PERSONID = b2.PERSONID
JOIN LINKING_A a2
ON b2.GROUPLIST = a.GROUPLIST
JOIN GROUPS g2
ON a2.GROUPID = g.GROUPID
And then I can return information from p and g2 in the result set. You can see where I'm having trouble. That's a lot of joining on some large tables, not to mention a number of other joins that are performed in this query as well. I need to be able to query by joining PEOPLE to GROUPS, then specify that if any person has an associated group that is in the subquery, it should return ALL groups affiliated with that entry in PEOPLE. I'm thinking that GROUP BY might be just the thing, but I haven't used that one enough to really know. So if Bill is part of group A, B, and C, and our subquery returns a set containing Group A, the result set should include Bill along with groups A, B, and C.
The following is a shorter way to get all the groups that people in the supplied group list are in. Does this help?
Select g.*
From Linking_B b
Join Linking_B b2
On b2.PersonId = b.PersonId
Join Group g
On g.GroupId = b2.GroupId
Where b.Groupid in (SubQuery)
I'm not clear why you have both Linking_A and Linking_B. Generally all you should need to represent a many-to-many relationship between two master tables is a single association table with GroupID and PersonId.
I often recommend using "common table expressions" [CTE's] in order to help you break a problem up into chunks that can be easier to understand. CTE's are specified using a WITH clause, which can contain several CTE's before starting the main SELECT query.
I'm going to assume that the list of groups you want to start with is specified by your subquery, so that will be the 1st CTE. The next one selects people who belong to those groups. The final part of the query then selects groups those people belong to, and returns the columns from both master tables.
WITH g1 as
(subquery)
, p1 as
(SELECT p.*
from g1
join Linking a1 on g1.groupID=a1.groupID
join People p on p.personID=a1.personID )
SELECT p1.*, g2.*
from p1
join Linking a2 on p2.personID=a2.personID
join Groups g2 on g2.groupID=a2.groupID
I think I'd build the list of people you want to pull records for first, then use that to query out all the groups for those people. This will work across any number of link tables with the appropriate joins added:
with persons_wanted as
(
--figure out which people are in a group you want to include
select p.person_key
from person p
join link l1
on p.person_key = l1.person_key
join groups g
on l1.group_key = g.group_key
where g.group name in ('GROUP_I_WANT_PEOPLE_FROM', 'THIS_ONE_TOO')
group by p.person_key --we only want each person_key once
)
--now pull all the groups for the list of people in at least one group we want
select p.name as person_name, g.name as group_name, ...
from person p
join link l1
on p.person_key = l1.person_key
join groups g
on l1.group_key = g.group_key
where p.person_key in (select person_key from persons_wanted);
I'm working on enhancing a query for a DB2 database and I'm having some problems getting acceptable performance due to the number of joins across large tables that need to be performed to get all of the data and I'm hoping that there's a SQL function or technique that can simplify and speed up the process.
To break it down, let's say there are two tables: People and Groups. Groups contain multiple people, and a person can be part of multiple groups. It's a many-to-many, but bear with me. Basically, there's a subquery that will return a set of groups. From that, I can join to People (which requires additional joins across other tables) to get all of the people from those groups. However, I also need to know all of the groups that those people are in, which means joining back to the Groups table again (several more joins) to get a superset of the original subquery. There are additional joins in the query as well to get other pieces of relevant data, and the cost is adding up in a very ugly way. I also need to return information from both tables, so that rules out a number of techniques.
What I'd like to do is be able to start with the People table, join it to Groups, and then compare Groups with the subquery. If the Groups attached to one person has one match in the subquery, it should return ALL Group items associated with that person.
Essentially, let's say that Bob is part of Group A, B, and C. Currently, I start with groups, and let's say that only Group A comes out of the subquery. Then I join A to Bob, but then I have to come back and join Bob to Group again to get B and C. SQL example:
SELECT p.*, g2.*
FROM GROUP g
JOIN LINKA link
ON link.GROUPID = g.GROUPID
JOIN LINKB link1
ON link1.LISTID = link.LISTID
JOIN PERSON p
ON link1.PERSONID = p.PERSONID
JOIN LINKB link2
ON link2.PERSONID = p.PERSONID
JOIN LINKA link3
ON link2.LISTID = link3.LISTID
JOIN GROUP g2
ON link3.GROUPID = g2.GROUPID
WHERE
g.GROUPID IN (subquery)
Yes, the linking tables aren't ideal, but they're basically normalized tables containing additional information that is not relevant to the query I'm running. We have to start with a filtered Group set, join to People, then come back to get all of the Groups that the People are associated to.
What I'd like to do is start with People, join to Group, and if ANY Group that Bob is in returns from the subquery, ALL should be returned, so if we have Bob joined to A, B, and C, and A is in the subquery, it will return three rows of Bob to A, B, and C as there was at least one match. In this way, it could be treated as a one-to-many relationship if we're only concerned with the Groups for each Person and not the other way around. SQL example:
SELECT p.*, g.*
FROM PEOPLE p
JOIN LINKB link
ON link.PERSONID = p.PERSONID
JOIN LINKA link1
ON link.LISTID = link1.LISTID
JOIN GROUP g
ON link1.GROUPID = g.GROUPID
WHERE
--SQL function, expression, or other method to return
--all groups for any person who is part of any group contained in the subquery
The number of joins in the first query make it largely unusable as these are some pretty big tables. The second would be far more ideal if this sort of thing is possible.
From the question, I think you are querying hierarchical data. DB2 provides facility to deal with such data. There are two clauses Start with and Connect by in DB2 which will be useful. They are explained here.