Optimizing a request doing tons of exclusions - sql

Question

I have a huge and dirty SQL request doing many exclusions and I feel bad about it. Perhaps, you know a better way to proceed.
Here's a part of my request:
select name, version, iteration, score
from article, articlemaster
where article.idmaster = articlemaster.id
and article.id not in (select article.id
from article, spsarticlemaster
where article.idmaster = articlemaster.id
and articlemaster.name = 'nameOfMyArticle'
and article.version = 'A'
and article.state = 'CONTINUE')
and article.id not in....
and article.id not in....
You think it doesn't look that bad ? Actually, this is only a portion of the request, the "and spsarticle.id not in ...." exclude one article, and i got more than 1000 to exclude, so i'm using a java program to append the other 999.
Any idea how could i make a light version of this abomination ?

Answer 1

You might be better off loading all of the articles to exclude into a temporary table, then joining that table in to your query.
For example, create exclude_articles:
name version state
---- ------- -----
nameOfMyArticle A CONTINUE
Then exclude its results from the query:
select
article.name,
article.version,
article.iteration,
article.score
from
article
join articlemaster
on article.idmaster = articlemaster.id
where
not exists (
select 1
from article article2
join articlemaster articlemaster2
on article2.idmaster = articlemaster2.id
join exclude_articles
on articlemaster2.name = exclude_articles.name
and article2.version = exclude_articles.version
and article2.state = exclude_articles.state
where article.id = article2.id)
This is all assuming that the version and state are actually necessary for the exclusion logic. It would be a much easier case if the name is unique.

Answer 2

If you're using Java to create the query and process the results, then why not do all the complicated logic in Java? Just ask the database for all the articles matching some basic criterion (or maybe you really do want to read through all of them) and then filter the results:
select am.name, a.version, a.iteration, a.score, a.state
from article a, articlemaster am
where a.idmaster = am.id
and <some other basic criteria>
Then in Java loop over all the results (sorry, my Java is super rusty) and filter out the ones you don't want:
ArrayList recordList = ArrayList();
ArrayList finalList = ArrayList();
for (record in recordList) {
if (! filterThisRecord(record)) {
finalList.append(record);
}
}