SQL SERVER – Tips from the SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Finding un-matching Records – Day 5 of 35

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Finding un-matching Records

Often time we want to find records in one table that have no matching key in another table. This is common for things like finding products that have never sold, or students who did not re-enroll. Something we were expecting is missing. Records in one table were expecting some related activity in another table and did not find them. There are many ways to find these records.

Basic Subquery

We have probably all heard that subqueries should be avoided if there is a better solution. Often times basic subqueries are used where a simple “Unmatched Records Query” could have been used.

Let’s start off with the subquery example. Looking at the Location table in the figure below we see all the data. In fact, this table does not allow nulls for the LocationID field. Looking further, there are no nulls anywhere in the Location table. So does this mean that all locations have at least one employee? It’s possible that some of these locations might be new and have not employees working there yet.

How can we find the location with no employees. We can use a subquery. For example we can use the following query to find all locations of the JProCo database that have now employee working there.

SELECT *
FROM Location
WHERE LocationID
NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT LocationID
FROM Employee
WHERE LocationID IS NOT NULL)


Unmatched Records Queries

If you wanted to find all locations with no employees, you could run an “Unmatched Records Query”. Let’s build this piece by piece. In this case, we have to join the Location table with the Employee table to determine the location that has no employees. What type of join will tell us this? Since nulls don’t map through a join, the INNER JOIN drops the record from the result set and we won’t see Chicago. The outer join will show both the matches and the unmatched records, so we see every location. In the figure below we get all location even if there are no employees.

Notice Seattle is listed many times but Chicago is listed once with no employees found. A NULL appears in the fields from the Employee table for Chicago. With the Location table on the left and the NULL on the right, we have part of an unmatched records query. To find just the records that don’t match, we look for null records on the table that the outer join does not favor. In this case, it’s the Employee table.

The outer join will show us the unmatched records with null location details if you set the WHERE clause to look for nulls on a field in the non-dominant table. Unmatched record queries use SQL to return a result set displaying only the unmatched records between the two tables.

When our query criterion specifies NULL, only Chicago shows up in our result set. By doing a LEFT OUTER JOIN and using a NULL value from the Employee table (or “RIGHT” table) as our search condition criteria, our unmatched records query shows us one record.

Note: If you want to setup the sample JProCo database on your system you can watch this video.

Question 5

Q 5) Which of the following queries will show all location that have no employees?

1. SELECT P.EmployeeID, T.[Name] FROM Employee P LEFT OUTER JOIN Location T
   ON T.TerritoryID = P.TerritoryID
   WHERE T.TerritoryID IS NULL
2. SELECT P.EmployeeID, T.[Name] FROM Employee P LEFT OUTER JOIN Location T
   ON T.TerritoryID = P.TerritoryID
   WHERE P.TerritoryID IS NULL
3. SELECT P.EmployeeID, T.[Name] FROM Employee P RIGHT OUTER JOIN Location T
   ON T.TerritoryID = P.TerritoryID
   WHERE T.TerritoryID IS NULL
4. SELECT P.EmployeeID, T.[Name] FROM Employee P RIGHT OUTER JOIN Location T
   ON T.TerritoryID = P.TerritoryID
   WHERE P.TerritoryID IS NULL

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Reference:  Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)