Getting Counts Per User Across Tables in POSTGRESQL - sql

Question

I'm new to postgresql. I have a database that has three tables in it: Users, Order, Comments. Those three tables look like this
Orders Comments
------ --------
ID ID
UserID UserID
Description Details
CreatedOn CreatedOn
I'm trying to get a list of all of my users and how many orders each user has made and how many comments each user has made. In other words, the result of the query should look like this:
UserID Orders Comments
------ ------ --------
1 5 7
2 2 9
3 0 0
...
Currently, I'm trying the following:
SELECT
UserID,
(SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM Orders WHERE UserID=ID) AS Orders,
(SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM Comments WHERE UserID=ID) AS Comments
FROM
Orders o,
Comments c
WHERE
o.UserID = c.UserID
Is this the right way to do this type of query? Or can someone provide a better approach from a performance standpoint?

Answer 1

SQL Fiddle
select
id, name,
coalesce(orders, 0) as orders,
coalesce(comments, 0) as comments
from
users u
left join
(
select userid as id, count(*) as orders
from orders
group by userid
) o using (id)
left join
(
select userid as id, count(*) as comments
from comments
group by userid
) c using (id)
order by name

Answer 2

The usual way to do this is by using outer joins to the two other tables and then group by the id (and name)
select u.id,
u.name,
count(distinct o.id) as num_orders,
count(distinct c.id) as num_comments
from users u
left join orders o on o.userId = u.id
left join comments c on c.userId = u.id
group by u.id, u.name
order by u.name;
That might very well be faster than your approach. But Postgres' query optimizer is quite smart and I have seen situations where both solutions are essentially equal in performance.
You will need to test that on your data and also have a look at the execution plans in order to find out which one is more efficient.