I'm having problems understanding the class table inheritance structure that you can implement using database tables. Info on class table inheritance. I have a use case where I have quite different types of persons that I need to model, but they have very minor differences. For example, all of these persons, like Student, Professor and so on, have a surname and a lastname. My first thought was to move theses attributes into a different table inside a base table like you would do in Object Oriented Programming. Here to illustrate further:
Right now, a Professor can only have one person, for example, otherwise it wouldn't make sense in my use case. Also, I have a school table that has two foreign keys, one for the Professor and one for the Student. Lets assume that a school can also have only one professor and one student. This is not the real use case that I have. This example just represents the relation in my real use case which would be too much to explain here.
What I don't understand is how you would collect data based on that. I'm trying to make a SQL Server View where I want to load the Person of the Professor and the Person of the Student from the view point of the School Table. For example:
SELECT
School.professor_id
surname,
lastname
FROM dbo.School AS school
INNER JOIN dbo.Professor as prof
ON school.professor_id = prof.ID
INNER JOIN dbo.Person as prof_person
ON prof.person_id = prof_person.ID
I can output the surname and lastname of the professor, but now I am stuck since I can't figure out how to get the person of the student.
A subtype table typically shares a key with the supertype table, instead of having its own PK and a FK. EG Student.ID is both the PK and the FK.
Then just join Student>Person in addition to Professor>Person, eg
SELECT
School.Id,
prof_person.surname prof_surname,
student_person.surname student_surname
FROM dbo.School AS school
INNER JOIN dbo.Professor as prof
ON school.professor_id = prof.ID
INNER JOIN dbo.Person as prof_person
ON prof.ID = prof_person.ID
INNER JOIN dbo.Student as student
ON school.student_id = student.ID
INNER JOIN dbo.Person as student_person
ON student.ID = student_person.ID
INNER JOIN is associative, so no need for special ordering or parentheses.
According to a simple scenario ER diagram as follows.
Based on that, I developed a database mapping as follows.
In there, orange color columns shows the primary key of the tables and yellow color columns shows foreign key of the tables. Is this mapping correct? Now my problem is I need to retrieve students data who learned from some teacher, which means need to retrieve some teacher's sudents who learned from his/her.
You need to learn about how to join tables using different types of available JOINs.
For your scenario , try like following, it will give you Student and the Teacher mapping.
select s.*
tbl_student s
inner join tbl_Course_Subjects tcs on s.Course_Id= tcs.Course_Id
inner join tbl_Subjects_Teacher tst on tst.SubjectId=tcs.Subject_Id
inner join tbl_Teacher t on t.Teacher_Id=tst.Teacher_Id
where t.Teacher_Id = #SomeTeacherId
What is the best way to join humongous table two or more times?
For example In this fictitious example, we have students table, student record who has TUTOR_ID column is a reference to the same table to another student.
What I am trying to accomplish is a report that will find all tutors that share the same students.
So I have built a query like this:
First time to find parent child relationships
Second time to find all tutors that share the same students
I tried to use "with clause" but query performance is really bad
Is there a better approach to take?
WITH STUDENT_TMP_TABLE AS (
select
TUTORS.STUDENT_IDENTIFIER as TUTOR_STUDENT_IDENTIFIER,
CADETS.STUDENT_IDENTIFIER as CADET_STUDENT_IDENTIFIER
FROM V_STUDENTS_RELATIONS TUTORS
INNER JOIN V_STUDENT_RELATIONS CADETS ON CADETS.TUTOR_ID = TUTORS.STUDENT_IDENTIFIER AND TUTORS.TUTOR_ID IS NULL
WHERE -- ? conditions truncated
)
SELECT
*
FROM STUDENT_TMP_TABLE STUD_TMP1
JOIN STUDENT_TMP_TABLE STUD_TMP2
ON STUD_TMP1.TUTOR_STUDENT_IDENTIFIER <> STUD_TMP2.TUTOR_STUDENT_IDENTIFIER
AND STUD_TMP1.CADET_STUDENT_IDENTIFIER = STUD_TMP2.CADET_STUDENT_IDENTIFIER;
I have 2 tables:
Class (PK = Tutor)
Columns: ID / Tutor / Room
Teacher (PK FK = Tutor)
Columns: Tutor / Contact
I want to join both tables.
Does it matter what order the tables are joined?
ie.
SELECT Class.ID, Class.Tutor, Teacher.Contact
FROM **Class INNER JOIN Teacher** ON Class.Tutor=Teacher.Tutor
or could I do it the other way round and Teacher INNER JOIN Class instead?
Both tables also share a common column name Tutor.
Does it matter if I use Class.Tutor or Teacher.Tutor in the query?
For an INNER JOIN, the order does not matter; the result set you will get will contain all the rows from both Class and Teacher where the common field Tutor matches, whichever order you specify Teacher and Class.
When you use an OUTER JOIN, the order does matter; I would recommend looking at the answers to What is the difference between Left, Right, Outer and Inner Joins?.
Yes, the order matters.
Selecting from class and joining Teacher will show only those classes that have a teacher
Selecting from teacher and joining Class will show only those teachers that have a class
Depending on what you are trying to achieve you'll know which is most relevant.
I'd recommend using "left join" though, it will give you all the classes even if they don't have teacher assigned etc
FWIW "class" is likely to be a reserved word in your database, server side script and client side scripting languages. I'd find another word for that table name.
I know I'm gonna get down votes, but I have to make sure if this is logical or not.
I have three tables A, B, C. B is a table used to make a many-many relationship between A and C. But the thing is that A and C are also related directly in a 1-many relationship
A customer added the following requirement:
Obtain the information from the Table B inner joining with A and C, and in the same query relate A and C in a one-many relationship
Something like:
alt text http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/7371/74492374sa4.png
I tried doing the query but always got 0 rows back. The customer insists that I can accomplish the requirement, but I doubt it. Any comments?
PS. I didn't have a more descriptive title, any ideas?
UPDATE:
Thanks to rcar, In some cases this can be logical, in order to have a history of all the classes a student has taken (supposing the student can only take one class at a time)
UPDATE:
There is a table for Contacts, a table with the Information of each Contact, and the Relationship table. To get the information of a Contact I have to make a 1:1 relationship with Information, and each contact can have like and an address book with; this is why the many-many relationship is implemented.
The full idea is to obtain the contact's name and his address book.
Now that I got the customer's idea... I'm having trouble with the query, basically I am trying to use the query that jdecuyper wrote, but as he warns, I get no data back
This is a doable scenario. You can join a table twice in a query, usually assigning it a different alias to keep things straight.
For example:
SELECT s.name AS "student name", c1.className AS "student class", c2.className as "class list"
FROM s
JOIN many_to_many mtm ON s.id_student = mtm.id_student
JOIN c c1 ON s.id_class = c1.id_class
JOIN c c2 ON mtm.id_class = c2.id_class
This will give you a list of all students' names and "hardcoded" classes with all their classes from the many_to_many table.
That said, this schema doesn't make logical sense. From what I can gather, you want students to be able to have multiple classes, so the many_to_many table should be where you'd want to find the classes associated with a student. If the id_class entries used in table s are distinct from those in many_to_many (e.g., if s.id_class refers to, say, homeroom class assignments that only appear in that table while many_to_many.id_class refers to classes for credit and excludes homeroom classes), you're going to be better off splitting c into two tables instead.
If that's not the case, I have a hard time understanding why you'd want one class hardwired to the s table.
EDIT: Just saw your comment that this was a made-up schema to give an example. In other cases, this could be a sensible way to do things. For example, if you wanted to keep track of company locations, you might have a Company table, a Locations table, and a Countries table. The Company table might have a 1-many link to Countries where you would keep track of a company's headquarters country, but a many-to-many link through Locations where you keep track of every place the company has a store.
If you can give real information as to what the schema really represents for your client, it might be easier for us to figure out whether it's logical in this case or not.
Perhaps it's a lack of caffeine, but I can't conceive of a legitimate reason for wanting to do this. In the example you gave, you've got students, classes and a table which relates the two. If you think about what you want the query to do, in plain English, surely it has to be driven by either the student table or the class table. i.e.
select all the classes which are attended by student 1245235
select all the students which attend class 101
Can you explain the requirement better? If not, tell your customer to suck it up. Having a relationship between Students and Classes directly (A and C), seems like pure madness, you've already got table B which does that...
Bear in mind that the one-to-many relationship can be represented through the many-to-many, most simply by adding a field there to indicate the type of relationship. Then you could have one "current" record and any number of "history" ones.
Was the customer "requirement" phrased as given, by the way? I think I'd be looking to redefine my relationship with them if so: they should be telling me "what" they want (ideally what, in business domain language, their problem is) and leaving the "how" to me. If they know exactly how the thing should be implemented, then I'd be inclined to open the source code in an editor and leave them to it!
I'm supposing that s.id_class indicates the student's current class, as opposed to classes she has taken in the past.
The solution shown by rcar works, but it repeats the c1.className on every row.
Here's an alternative that doesn't repeat information and it uses one fewer join. You can use an expression to compare s.id_class to the current c.id_class matched via the mtm table.
SELECT s.name, c.className, (s.id_class = c.id_class) AS is_current
FROM s JOIN many_to_many AS mtm ON (s.id_student = mtm.id_student)
JOIN c ON (c.id_class = mtm.id_class);
So is_current will be 1 (true) on one row, and 0 (false) on all the other rows. Or you can output something more informative using a CASE construct:
SELECT s.name, c.className,
CASE WHEN s.id_class = c.id_class THEN 'current' ELSE 'past' END AS is_current
FROM s JOIN many_to_many AS mtm ON (s.id_student = mtm.id_student)
JOIN c ON (c.id_class = mtm.id_class);
It doesn't seem to make sense. A query like:
SELECT * FROM relAC RAC
INNER JOIN tableA A ON A.id_class = RAC.id_class
INNER JOIN tableC C ON C.id_class = RAC.id_class
WHERE A.id_class = B.id_class
could generate a set of data but inconsistent. Or maybe we are missing some important part of the information about the content and the relationships of those 3 tables.
I personally never heard a requirement from a customer that would sound like:
Obtain the information from the Table
B inner joining with A and C, and in
the same query relate A and C in a
one-many relationship
It looks like that it is what you translated the requirement to.
Could you specify the requirement in plain English, as what results your customer wants to get?