I have two tables: one called EMP_Names which simply stores ID and Employee_Name and another table called EMP_Main which stores the main data and which refers to EMP_Names via IDs. Amongst other fields EMP_Main has fields called Technician_Name_ID and Leader_Name_ID which is related to EMP_Names. My problem is this: how can i run a query where both Technician_Name_ID and Leader_Name_ID resolve to Names? In other words both ID fields refer to the same EMP_Names.ID but I can only establish one relationship between the two tables.
Don't know if I'm clear because it's difficult to explain ...
You can use join but you need multiple joins.
select em.*, ent.name as technician, enl.name as leader
from (emp_main as em left join
emp_names as ent
on em.technician_name_id = ent.id
) left join
emp_names as enl
on em.leader_name_id = enl.id;
These are left joins in case the fields are not populated for all rows.
Related
I have a query with joins that is not using the index that would be the best match and I am looking for help to correct this.
I have the following query:
select
equipment.name,purchaselines.description,contacts.name,vendors.accountNumber
from purchaselines
left join vendors on vendors.id = purchaselines.vendorId
left join contacts on contacts.id = vendors.contactId
left join equipment on equipment.id = purchaselines.equipmentId
where contacts.id = 12345
The table purchaselines has an index on the column vendorId, which is the proper index to use. When the query is run, I know the value of contacts.id which is joined to vendors.contactId which is joined to purchaselines.vendorId.
What is the proper way to run this query? Currently, no index is used on the table purchaselines.
If you are intending to query a specific contact, I would put THAT first since that is the primary basis. Additionally, you had left-joins to the other tables (vendors, contacts, equipment). So by having a WHERE clause to the CONTACTS table forces the equation to become an INNER JOIN, thus REQUIRING.
That said, I would try to rewrite the query as (also using aliases for simplified readability of longer table names)
select
equipment.name,
purchaselines.description,
contacts.name,
vendors.accountNumber
from
contacts c
join vendors v
on c.id = v.contactid
join purchaselines pl
on v.id = pl.vendorid
join equipment e
on pl.equipmentid = e.id
where
c.id = 12345
Also notice the indentation of the JOINs helps readability (IMO) to see how/where each table gets to the next in a more hierarchical manner. They are all regular inner JOIN context.
So, the customer ID will be the first / fastest, then to vendors by that contact ID which should optimize the join to that. Then, I would expect the purchase lines to have an index on vendorid optimizing that. And finally, the equipment table on ITs PK.
FEEDBACK Basic JOIN clarification.
JOIN is just the explicit statement of how two tables are related. By listing them left-side and right-side and the join condition showing on what relationship is between them is all.
Now, in your data example, each table is subsequently nested under the one prior. It is quite common though that one table may link to multiple other tables. For example an employee. A customer could have an ethnicity ID linking to an ethnicity lookup table, but also, a job position id also linking to a job position lookup table. That might look something like
select
e.name,
eth.ethnicity,
jp.jobPosition
from
employee e
join ethnicitiy eth
on e.ethnicityid = eth.id
join jobPosition jp
on e.jobPositionID = jp.id
Notice here that both ethnicity and jobPosition are at the same hierarchical level to the employee table scenario. If, for example, you wanted to further apply conditions that you only wanted certain types of employees, you can just add your logical additional conditions directly at the location of the join such as
join jobPosition jp
on e.jobPositionID = jp.id
AND jp.jobPosition = 'Manager'
This would get you a list of only those employees who are managers. You do not need to explictily add a WHERE condition if you already include it directly at the JOIN/ON criteria. This helps keeping the table-specific criteria at the join if you ever find yourself needing LEFT JOINs.
Currently I have a staff table with columns:
Staff_Id, first_name, Surname.
My second table is:
Id, management_role.
When I link the tables each staff member gets added to every management role. So for example a person in first table called Jim is added three times as manager, supervisor, intern and this happens for every staff.
Some things to consider that are your ID columns are primary keys for their respective tables. If not are every value in the column is unique? Also are ids not
From your description you might be using a cross join here. The thing you need is inner join so it joins the matching id's together.
So you can do
SELECT *
FROM staff_table as st
INNER JOIN management_table as mt
ON st.Staff_Id = mt.ID
I have two tables, Invoices and members, connected by PK/FK relationship through the field InvoiceNum. I have created the following sql and it works fine, and pulls 44 records as expected.
SELECT
INVOICES.InvoiceNum,
INVOICES.GroupNum,
INVOICES.DivisionNum,
INVOICES.DateBillFrom,
INVOICES.DateBillTo
FROM INVOICES
INNER JOIN MEMBERS ON INVOICES.InvoiceNum = MEMBERS.InvoiceNum
WHERE MEMBERS.MemberNum = '20032526000'
Now, I want to replace INVOICES.GroupNum and INVOICES.DivisionNum in the above query with GroupName and DivisionName. These values are present in the Groups and Divisions tables which also have the corresponding Group_num and Division_num fields. I have created the following sql. The problem is that it now pulls 528 records instead of 44!
SELECT
INVOICES.InvoiceNum,
INVOICES.DateBillFrom,
INVOICES.DateBillTo,
DIVISIONS.DIVISION_NAME,
GROUPS.GROUP_NAME
FROM INVOICES
INNER JOIN MEMBERS ON INVOICES.InvoiceNum = MEMBERS.InvoiceNum
INNER JOIN GROUPS ON INVOICES.GroupNum = GROUPS.Group_Num
INNER JOIN DIVISIONS ON INVOICES.DivisionNum = DIVISIONS.Division_Num
WHERE MEMBERS.MemberNum = '20032526000'
Any help is greatly appreciated.
You have at least one relation between your tables which is missing in your query. It gives you extra records. Find all common fields. Say, are divisions related to groups?
The statement is fine, as far as the SQL syntax goes.
But the question you have to ask yourself (and answer it):
How many rows in Groups do you get for that given GroupNum?
Ditto for Divisions - how many rows exist for that DivisionNum?
It would appear that those numbers aren't unique - multiple rows exist for each number - therefore you get multiple rows returned
It seems to me that there are two scenarios in which to use JOINs:
When data would otherwise be duplicated
When data from one query would otherwise be used in another query
Are these scenarios right? Are there any other scenarios in which to use JOIN?
EDIT: I think I've miscommunicated. I understand how a JOIN works, what I'm not so sure about is when to use one.
JOINS are used to JOIN tables together with related information.
Tipical situations are where you have lets say
A user table where the user has specific security settings. The join would be used such that you can determine which settings the user has.
Users
-UserID
-UserName
UserSecurityRoles
-UserID
-SecurityRoleID
SecurityRoles
-SecurityRoleID
-SecurityRole
SELECT *
FROM Users u INNER JOIN
UserSecurityRoles usr ON u.UserID = usr.UserID INNER JOIN
SecurityRoles sr ON usr.SecurityRoleID = sr.SecurityRoleID
WHERE sr.SecurityRole = 'Admin'
LEFT joins will be used in the cases where you wish to retrieve all the data from the table in the left hand side, and only data from the right that match.
JOINS are used when you start normalizing your table structure. You can crete a table with 100s on columns, where a lot of the data could possibly be NULL, or you can normalize the tables, such that you avoid having too many columns with null values, where you group the appropriate data into table structures.
The answer to this Question has a VERY good link that has graphical display of using JOINs
JOINS are used to return data that is related in a relational database. Data can be related in 3 ways
One to Many relationship (A Person can have many Transactions)
Many to Many relationship (A Doctor can have many Patients, but a Patient can have more than one Doctor)
One to One relationship (One Person can have exactly one Passport number)
JOINS come in various flavours:
AN INNER JOIN will return data from both tables where the keys in each table match
A LEFT JOIN or RIGHT JOIN will return all the rows from one table and matching data from the other table
A CROSS JOIN will return the product of each table
You use joins when you need information from more than one table :)
I'm trying to implement something similar to Ruby on Rails' polymorphic relationships.
I have the following three tables :
Events
Users
Organisations
An event can be owner by either a user or an organisation, so my Events table includes the columns: owner_type and owner_id.
I can easily list all events that belong to either users or organisations through an inner join and where clause, however, is there a way to make the join table conditional based on the value of the owner_type column, allowing all events to be listed together, regardless of owner_type?
I hope that makes sense.
Any advice appreciated.
Thanks.
You can't make the join table conditional, so in this case you would have to join events to both users and organisations and use coalesce to merge the common fields (eg. name) together.
select e.id, coalesce(u.name, o.name) owner_name
from events e
left join users u on e.owner_id = u.id and e.owner_type = 'user'
left join organisations o on e.owner_id = o.id and e.owner_type = 'org'
However, you may consider creating an owners table, which contains both users and organisations, with a structure like (id, type, org_id, name, ...). This would only require a single join, but may complicate other areas of your schema, eg. user membership of an organisation.
An alternative method would be to union the users and organisations tables together and then join once from events.
Owner has columns common to all owner-subtypes.
Person and Organization have columns specific to each one.
How about moving ownership information out of Events into two join tables, EventsUsers and EventsOrganisations (each of which has just two columns, FKs to Events and the apppropriate owning-object table) ? Then you can UNION two queries each of which joins through the join table to the owning-object table.
A bit old, but I think it would be useful, this version performs better in my scenario than multiple joins
select e.id,
case when e.owner_type = 'person' then
(
select p.name from person p
where p.id=e.owner_id
)
else
(
select o.name from organization o
where o.id=e.owner_id
)
end entityName,
e.owner_type
from events e
in postgres you could even build a json of entire related entity