Select one record from two tables in Oracle - sql

Question

There are three tables:
A table about students: s41071030(sno, sname, ssex, sage, sdept)
A table about course: c41071030(cno, cname, cpno, credit)
A table about selecting courses: sc41071030(sno, cno, grade)
Now, I want select the details about a student whose sdept='CS' and he or she has selected the most courses in department 'CS'.

Answer 1

As with any modestly complex SQL statement, it is best to do 'TDQD' — Test Driven Query Design. Start off with simple parts of the question and build them into a more complex answer.
To find out how many courses each student in the CS department is taking, we write:
SELECT S.Sno, COUNT(*) NumCourses
FROM s41071030 S
JOIN sc41071030 SC ON S.Sno = SC.Sno
WHERE S.Sdept = 'CS'
GROUP BY S.Sno;
We now need to find the largest value of NumCourses:
SELECT MAX(NumCourses) MaxCourses
FROM (SELECT S.Sno, COUNT(*) NumCourses
FROM s41071030 S
JOIN sc41071030 SC ON S.Sno = SC.Sno
WHERE S.Sdept = 'CS'
GROUP BY S.Sno
)
Now we need to join that result with the sub-query, so it is time for a CTE (Common Table Expression):
WITH N AS
(SELECT S.Sno, COUNT(*) NumCourses
FROM s41071030 S
JOIN sc41071030 SC ON S.Sno = SC.Sno
WHERE S.Sdept = 'CS'
GROUP BY S.Sno
)
SELECT N.Sno
FROM N
JOIN (SELECT MAX(NumCourses) MaxCourses FROM N) M
ON M.MaxCourses = N.NumCourses;
And we need to get the student details, so we join that with the student table:
WITH N AS
(SELECT S.Sno, COUNT(*) NumCourses
FROM s41071030 S
JOIN sc41071030 SC ON S.Sno = SC.Sno
WHERE S.Sdept = 'CS'
GROUP BY S.Sno
)
SELECT S.*
FROM s41071030 S
JOIN N ON N.Sno = S.Sno
JOIN (SELECT MAX(NumCourses) MaxCourses FROM N) M
ON M.MaxCourses = N.NumCourses;
Lightly tested SQL: you were warned. To test, run the component queries, making sure you get reasonable results each time. Don't move on to the next query until the previous one is working correctly.
Note that the courses table turns out to be immaterial to the query you are solving.
Also note that this may return several rows if it turns out there are several students all taking the same number of courses and that number is the largest number that any student is taking. (So, if there are 3 students taking 7 courses each, and no student taking more than 7 courses, then you will see 3 rows in the result set.)

Answer 2

Aggregate sc41071030 rows to get the counts.
Join the results to s41071030 to:
filter rows on sdept;
get student details;
RANK() the joined rows on the count values.
Select rows with the ranking of 1.
WITH
aggregated AS (
SELECT
sno,
COUNT(*) AS coursecount
FROM
sc41071030
GROUP BY
sno
),
ranked AS (
SELECT
s.*,
RANK() OVER (ORDER BY agg.coursecount DESC) AS rnk
FROM
s41071030 s
INNER JOIN aggregated agg ON s.sno = agg.sno
WHERE
s.sdept = 'CS'
)
SELECT
sno,
sname,
ssex,
sage,
sdept
FROM
ranked
WHERE
rnk = 1
;