Select Null as Empty from (select * from TblMetaData)
Looks like, it is trying to get null rows for the same number of rows in tblMetaData.
EDIT: This could be written as
SELECT Null AS Empty FROM tblMetaData
It will yield a result set with one column named Empty which only contains NULL values. The number of rows will be equal to the number of rows available in TblMetaData.
It looks like the result of one of two possible situations:
The developer was getting paid per line, and threw in that query. It was probably originally structured to take more than one line.
The developer was incompetent and this was the only way they could think of to generate a bunch of null values.
The query returns a null value from each line of the table, so the only real information in the result is the number of records in the table.
This can of course be found out a lot more efficently using:
select count(*) as Count from TblMetaData
It's possible that the developer was not at all aware of the count aggregate (or how to search the web) and tried to get the number of records while making the result as small as possible.
It often used in this expression
select * from TableA where exists
(select null from TableB where TableB.Col1=TableA.Col1)
it can be used to give the number of rows in the table TblMetaData with the column's name denoting the first letter of empty(in this case only).
like suppose you gave
Select Null as Empty from (select * from TblMetaData)
so it will give
E
n rows selected
here n is the number of rows in the table.
suppose you gave
Select Null as XYZ from (select * from TblMetaData)
then it would be same but the column's name would change like
X
n rows selected
Related
I am struggling to understand what the output of SELECT is meant to be in SQL (I am using MS ACCESS), and what sort of criteria this output needs to specify, if any. As a result, I don't understand why some queries work and others don't. So I know it retrieves data from a table, does calculations with it and displays it. But I don't understand the "inner" working of SELECT function. For instance, what is the name of data structure / entity it displays? Is it a "new" table?
And for example, suppose I have a table called "table_name", with 5 columns. One of the columns called "column_3", and there are 20 records.
SELECT column_3, COUNT(*) AS Count
FROM table_name;
Why does this query fail to run? By logic, I would expect it to display two columns: first column will be "column_3", containing 20 rows with relevant data, and second column will be "Count", containing just one non-empty row (displaying 20), and other 19 rows will be empty (or NULL maybe)?
Is it because SELECT is meant to produce equal number of rows for each column?
Your questions involve a basic understanding of SQL. SELECT statements do not create tables, but instead return virtual result sets. Nothing is persisted unless you change it to an INSERT.
In your example question, you will need to "tell" the SQL engine what you want a count "of". Because you added column_3, you need to write:
SELECT column_3, COUNT(*) AS Count
FROM table_name
GROUP BY column_3
If you wanted a count of all the rows, simply:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table_name
Update x1 a set a.dept_cd=(select distinct dept_cd from x2 b a.nm=b.nm)
It's my sql
Distinct make data unique, but it result in an error message,
row subquery returns more than one row
My data is string
So i use name to return code(dept_cd)
Can you help me?
If this query return that error, it means that you have more than one dept_cd where nm is equal to the one you are looking for.
The goal of distinct is to avoid having twice the same value of dept_cd.
If you need one the first one no matter what the value is, you can add limit 0,1 ad the end of your subquery.
If the value you need is a specific one, you need to find a way to update your query to isolate it but without having the full context, we cannot help you on that.
I am attempting to return the row of the highest value for timestamp (an integer) for each person (that has multiple entries) in a table. Additionally, I am only interested in rows with the field containing ABCD, but this should be done after filtering to return the latest (max timestamp) entry for each person.
SELECT table."person", max(table."timestamp")
FROM table
WHERE table."type" = 1
HAVING table."field" LIKE '%ABCD%'
GROUP BY table."person"
For some reason, I am not receiving the data I expect. The returned table is nearly twice the size of expectation. Is there some step here that I am not getting correct?
You can 1st return a table having max(timestamp) and then use it in sub query of another select statement, following is query
SELECT table."person", timestamp FROM
(SELECT table."person",max(table."timestamp") as timestamp, type, field FROM table GROUP BY table."person")
where type = 1 and field LIKE '%ABCD%'
Direct answer: as I understand your end goal, just move the HAVING clause to the WHERE section:
SELECT
table."person", MAX(table."timestamp")
FROM table
WHERE
table."type" = 1
AND table."field" LIKE '%ABCD%'
GROUP BY table."person";
This should return no more than 1 row per table."person", with their associated maximum timestamp.
As an aside, I surprised your query worked at all. Your HAVING clause referenced a column not in your query. From the documentation (and my experience):
The fundamental difference between WHERE and HAVING is this: WHERE selects input rows before groups and aggregates are computed (thus, it controls which rows go into the aggregate computation), whereas HAVING selects group rows after groups and aggregates are computed.
I am new to VBA so I apologize in advance if this seems basic to you experts but I appreciate all of the help I can get.
I have a table containing a column of reference numbers that can grow or shrink weekly. I also have a query pulling back price list data that has changed since last week. The query results vary weekly. What I need to do is assign all of the query results to each reference number and have all of that end up in a make table. For example if there are 10 reference numbers and the query result is 10 rows then 100 lines would be added to the table (adding the reference number to the beginning of each row). This sounds like some sort of loop but your the experts, not me.
Thanks in advance!
You can solve it with a cross join. In a cross join you join two tables without specifying a join clause. Such a query returns all possible combinations of rows of the two tables (this is called a Cartesian product)
SELECT col_a, col_b INTO newTable
FROM table_a, table_b
If table_a contains 10 rows and table_b contains 5 rows, this returns 50 rows.
For a user logging table I have in a SQL database, I track the some of the parameters off of a report request. The report allows multiple ID's to be passed to it and I store all of those in a single column in the database column. If this were to be a normalized set of data, there would definitely be an additional table setup for this, but this is what was inherited...
I've now been asked to give a quick count of the number of times a report was run with more than 2 ID's passed to it. I can easily get the number of records that have more than 1 report requested because they all include a comma.
What I need to do next is count the number of times a comma appears in a column. How do you do this in SQL?
--count the number of times more than 1 report was requested in the record
select
count(*) as cnt
from
[table]
where
RequestedReportParams Like '%,%'
SELECT LEN(RequestedReportParams) - LEN(REPLACE(RequestedReportParams, ',', ''))
FROM YourTable
WHERE .....
This is simply comparing the length of the column with the commas, with the length of the value with the commas removed, to give you the difference (i.e. the number of commas)
It seems the quick and dirty way to answer the question you've been asked would be to do this:
select
count(*) as cnt
FROM
[table]
WHERE
RequestedReportParams Like '%,%,%'