Please forgive my ignorance here. SQL is decidedly one of the biggest "gaps" in my education that I'm working on correcting, come October. Here's the scenario:
I have two tables in a DB that I need to access certain data from. One is users
, and the other is conversation_log
. The basic structure is outlined below:
users:
conversation_log
(note that I'm only listing the structure for the fields that are {or could be} relevant to the current challenge)
What I want to do is return a list of names from the users table that have at least one record in the conversation_log table. Currently, I'm doing this with two separate SQL statements, with the one that checks for records in conversation_log being called hundreds, if not thousands of times, once for each userid, just to see if records exist for that id.
Currently, the two SQL statements are as follows:
select id
from users
where 1; (gets the list of userid values for the next query)
select id
from conversation_log
where userid
= $userId limit 1; (checks for existing records)
Right now I have 4,000+ users listed in the users table. I'm sure that you can imagine just how long this method takes. I know there's an easier, more efficient way to do this, but being self-taught, this is something that I have yet to learn. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You have to do what is called a 'Join'. This, um, joins the rows of two tables together based on values they have in common.
See if this makes sense to you:
SELECT DISTINCT users.name
FROM users JOIN conversation_log ON users.id = converation_log.userid
Now JOIN by itself is an "inner join", which means that it will only return rows that both tables have in common. In other words, if a specific conversation_log.userid doesn't exist, it won't return any part of the row, user or conversation log, for that userid.
Also, +1 for having a clearly worded question : )
EDIT: I added a "DISTINCT", which means to filter out all of the duplicates. If a user appeared in more than one conversation_log row, and you didn't have DISTINCT, you would get the user's name more than once. This is because JOIN does a cartesian product , or does every possible combination of rows from each table that match your JOIN ON criteria.
Something like this:
SELECT *
FROM users
WHERE EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM conversation_log
WHERE users.id = conversation_log.userid
)
In plain English: select every row from users
, such that there is at least one row from conversation_log
with the matching userid
.
What you need to read is JOIN syntax.
SELECT count(*), users.name
FROM users left join conversion_log on users.id = conversation_log.userid
Group by users.name
You could add at the end if you wanted HAVING count(*) > 0
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