TSQL INNER JOIN - sql

I'm building an IT support ticketing portal for a multi-site company.
I cant get my head around JOIN, INNER JOIN, ON , etc.
I have 3 tables:
Firstly Support_Ticket containing Site_ID, which I already have from a previous query.
So I have the Site_ID, and need to get the name (string) of the engineer that is responsible for support on that site. Lets say Hull is Site_ID:1.
The other 2 tables :
Site_Details: containing (among others) Site_ID and Site_Default_Engineer_ID.
Engineers: containing (among others) [Engineer_ID] and Engineer_Display_Name.
What I want to achieve is (pseudo-code!):
return [Engineers].[Engineer_Display_Name]
where
[Engineers].[Engineer_ID] = [Site_Details].[Site_Default_Engineer_ID]
(but first) return [Site_Details].[Site_Default_Engineer_ID] where
[Site_Details].[Site_ID] = [Support_Ticket].[Site_ID]
if that makes sense?!

This query should work:
SELECT support_ticket.something, engineers.engineer_display_name
FROM support_ticket
JOIN site_details ON ( site_details.site_id = support_ticket.site_id )
JOIN engineers ON ( engineers.engineer_id = site_details.site_default_engineer_id )
It will present all tickets and their default engineer. Add a WHERE-clause to filter the ticket(s) you want to display.
BTW: There is no difference between JOIN and INNER JOIN.

Related

How to distinguish these two ID requests when joining tables?

SQL noob here. I have a database of soccer matches that I am trying to learn/practice SQL with.
In one table (called "Match") there is the match_api_id, date, home_team_api_id, away_team_api_id, home_team_goal, away_team_goal.
In another table (called "Team") there is the team_api_id, team_long_name.
Right now I am trying to do a query to show the ID of the match, the date, the home team's name, and the away team's name.
SELECT M.match_api_id, M.date, T.team_long_name, T.team_long_name
FROM Match M
JOIN Team T ON (M.home_team_api_id = T.team_api_id)
JOIN Team T ON (M.away_team_api_id = T.team_api_id)
LIMIT 10
This code worked when I only used one join (the first one) to show the home team's name. However, when I add the second join it gives me the ambiguous column name error. How do I alter this code so that I can also display the away team's name?
YOu need different table aliases. Otherwise T is ambiguous:
SELECT M.match_api_id, M.date, TH.team_long_name, TA.team_long_name
FROM Match M JOIN
Team TH
ON M.home_team_api_id = TH.team_api_id JOIN
Team TA
ON M.away_team_api_id = TA.team_api_id;
LIMIT 10

On an SQL Select, how do i avoid getting 0 results if I want to query for optional data in another table?

I have a table with Customers which includes their contact person in the helpdesk. I have another table that lists all vacancies of the helpdesk employees - if they are currently sick or on vacation etc.
I need to get the helpdesk contact and the start/end time of their vacation IF there is an entry.
I currently have this (simplified):
SELECT *
FROM dbo.Customers, dbo.Projects, dbo.Vacations
WHERE ($Phone = dbo.Customers.Phone)
AND dbo.Customers.CustomerID = dbo.Projects.CustomerID
AND dbo.Projects.HDContactID = dbo.Vacations.HDContactID
So if there is a vacation listed in the Vacations table, it works fine, but if there is no vacation at all, this will not return anything - what i want is that if there is no vacation, it simply returns the other data, and ignores the missing data (returns NULL, doesn't return anything, not important)
In any case, I need to get the Customers and Project data, even if the query can't find an entry in the Vacations table. How would I do this? I pretty new to SQL and couldn't find a similar question on this site
EDIT: I'm using SQL Server, currently using HeidiSQL
Try below query:
SELECT * FROM dbo.Customers, dbo.Projects
left join dbo.Vacations on dbo.Projects.HDContactID = dbo.Vacations.HDContactID
WHERE ($Phone = dbo.Customers.Phone)
AND dbo.Customers.CustomerID = dbo.Projects.CustomerID
Use left join as mentioned by #Flying Thunder,
Example of the left join:
SELECT country.country_name_eng, city.city_name, customer.customer_name
FROM customer
LEFT JOIN city ON customer.city_id = city.id
LEFT JOIN country ON city.country_id = country.id;
You can find a nice guide for the joins and SQL here:
https://www.sqlshack.com/learn-sql-join-multiple-tables/
You should be using LEFT JOIN. In fact, you should never be using commas in the FROM clause. That is just archaic syntax and closes the powerful world of JOINs from your queries.
I also recommend using table aliases that are abbreviations of table names. The best are abbreviations for the table names:
SELECT *
FROM dbo.Customers c LEFT JOIN
dbo.Projects p
ON c.CustomerID = p.CustomerID LEFT JOIN
dbo.Vacations v
ON p.HDContactID = v.HDContactID
WHERE c.Phone = $Phone;
Have you try this to skip vacation record if not present like this:
SELECT * FROM dbo.Customers, dbo.Projects, dbo.Vacations
WHERE ($Phone = dbo.Customers.Phone)
AND dbo.Customers.CustomerID = dbo.Projects.CustomerID
AND (dbo.Vacations.HDContactID IS NULL OR dbo.Projects.HDContactID = dbo.Vacations.HDContactID)

Subquery that matches column with several ranges defined in table

I've got a pretty common setup for an address database: a person is tied to a company with a join table, the company can have an address and so forth.
All pretty normalized and easy to use. But for search performance, I'm creating a materialized, rather denormalized view. I only need a very limited set of information and quick queries. Most of everything that's usually done via a join table is now in an array. Depending on the query, I can either search it directly or join it via unnest.
As a complement to my zipcodes column (varchar[]), I'd like to add a states column that has the (German fedaral) states already precomputed, so that I don't have to transform a query to include all kinds of range comparisons.
My mapping date is in a table like this:
CREATE TABLE zip2state (
state TEXT NOT NULL,
range_start CHARACTER VARYING(5) NOT NULL,
range_end CHARACTER VARYING(5) NOT NULL
)
Each state has several ranges, and ranges can overlap (one zip code can be for two different states). Some ranges have range_start = range_end.
Now I'm a bit at wit's end on how to get that into a materialized view all at once. Normally, I'd feel tempted to just do it iteratively (via trigger or on the application level).
Or as we're just talking about 5 digits, I could create a big table mapping zip to state directly instead of doing it via a range (my current favorite, yet something ugly enough that it prompted me to ask whether there's a better way)
Any way to do that in SQL, with a table like the above (or something similar)? I'm at postgres 9.3, all features allowed...
For completeness' sake, here's the subquery for the zip codes:
(select array_agg(distinct address.zipcode)
from affiliation
join company
on affiliation.ins_id = company.id
join address
on address.com_id = company.id
where affiliation.per_id = person.id) AS zipcodes,
I suggest a LATERAL join instead of the correlated subquery to conveniently compute both columns at once. Could look like this:
SELECT p.*, z.*
FROM person p
LEFT JOIN LATERAL (
SELECT array_agg(DISTINCT d.zipcode) AS zipcodes
, array_agg(DISTINCT z.state) AS states
FROM affiliation a
-- JOIN company c ON a.ins_id = c.id -- suspect you don't need this
JOIN address d ON d.com_id = a.ins_id -- c.id
LEFT JOIN zip2state z ON d.zipcode BETWEEN z.range_start AND z.range_end
WHERE a.per_id = p.id
) z ON true;
If referential integrity is guaranteed, you don't need to join to the table company at all. I took the shortcut.
Be aware that varchar or text behaves differently than expected for numbers. For example: '333' > '0999'. If all zip codes have 5 digits you are fine.
Related:
What is the difference between LATERAL and a subquery in PostgreSQL?

SQL query - Joining a many-to-many relationship, filtering/joining selectively

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);

Distinct Values in SQL Query - Advanced

I have searched high and low and have tried for hours to manipulate the various other queries that seemed to fit but I've had no joy.
I have several Tables in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 that I'm trying to join, an example of which is:
Company Table (Comp_CompanyId, Comp_Name)
GroupCode_Link Table (gcl_c_groupcodelinkid, gcl_c_groupcodeid, gcl_c_companyid)
GroupCode Table (grp_c_groupcodeid, grp_c_groupcode, grp_c_name)
ItemCode Table (itm_c_itemcodeid, itm_c_name, itm_c_itemcode, itm_c_group)
ItemCode_Link Table (icl_c_itemcodelinkid, icl_c_companyid, icl_c_groupcodeid, icl_c_itemcodeid)
I'm using Link Tables to associate a Group to a Company, and an Item to a Group, so a Company could have multiple groups, with multiple items in each group.
Now, I'm trying to create an Advanced Find Function that will allow a user to enter, for example, an Item Code and the result should display those companies that have that item, sounds nice and simple!
However, I haven't done something right, if I use the following query ' if the company has this item OR this item, display it's name', I get the company appearing twice in the result set, once for each item.
What I need is to be able to say is:
"Show me a list of companies that have these items (displaying each company only once!)"
I've had a go at using COUNT, DISTINCT and HAVING but have failed on each as my query knowledge isn't up to it!
First, from your description it sounds like you might have a problem with your E-R (entity-relationship) model. Your description tells me that your E-R model looks something like this:
Associative entities (CompanyGroup, GroupItem) exist to implement many-to-many relationships (since many-to-many isn't supported directly by relational databases).
Nothing wrong with that if a group can exist within multiple companies or an item across multiple groups. It would seem more likely that, at least, each group is specific to a company (I can see items existing across multiple companies and/or groups: more than one company retails, for instance, Cuisinart food processors). If that is the case, a better E-R model would be to make each group a dependent entity with a CompanyID that is a component of its primary key. It's a dependent entity because the group doesn't have an independent existence: it's created by/on behalf of and exists for its parent company. If the company goes away, the group(s) tied to it go away. No your E-R model looks like this:
From that, we can write the query you need:
select *
from Company c
where exists ( select *
from GroupItem gi
where gi.ItemID in ( desired-itemid-1 , ... , desired-itemid-n )
and gi.CompanyID = c.CompanyID
)
As you can see, dependent entities are a powerful thing. Because of the key propagation, queries tend to get simpler. With the original data model, the query would be somewhat more complex:
select *
from Company c
where exists ( select *
from CompanyGroup cg
join GroupItem gi on gi.GroupId = cg.GroupID
where gi.ItemID in ( desired-itemid-1 , ... , desired-itemid-n )
and cg.CompanyID = c.CompanyID
)
Cheers!
SELECT *
FROM company c
WHERE (
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT icl_c_itemcodeid)
FROM GroupCode_Link gl
JOIN ItemCode_Link il
ON il.icl_c_groupcodeid = gcl_c_groupcodeid
WHERE gl.gcl_c_companyid = c.Comp_CompanyId
AND icl_c_companyid = c.Comp_CompanyId
AND icl_c_itemcodeid IN (#Item1, #Item2)
) >= 2
Replace >= 2 with >= 1 if you want "any item" instead of "all items".
If you need to show companies that have item1 AND item2, you can use Quassnoi's answer.
If you need to show companies that have item1 OR item2, then you can use this:
SELECT
*
FROM
company
WHERE EXISTS
(
SELECT
icl_c_itemcodeid
FROM
GroupCode_Link
INNER JOIN
ItemCode_Link
ON icl_c_groupcodeid = gcl_c_groupcodeid
AND icl_c_itemcodeid IN (#item1, #item2)
WHERE
gcl_c_companyid = company.Comp_CompanyId
AND
icl_c_companyid = company.Comp_CompanyId
)
I would write something like the code below:
SELECT
c.Comp_Name
FROM
Company AS c
WHERE
EXISTS (
SELECT
1
FROM
GroupCode_Link AS gcl
JOIN
ItemCode_Link AS icl
ON
gcl.gcl_c_groupcodeid = icl.icl_c_groupcodeid
JOIN
ItemCode AS itm
ON
icl.icl_c_itemcodeid = itm.itm_c_itemcodeid
WHERE
c.Comp_CompanyId = gcl.gcl_c_companyid
AND
itm.itm_c_itemcode IN (...) /* here provide list of one or more Item Codes to look for */
);
but I see there's a icl_c_companyid column in the ItemCode_Link so using GroupCode_Link table is not necessary?