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Newbie Query question
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* Newbie Query question
@ 2004-03-23 09:56 Marcel Loose <loose@astron.nl>
  2004-03-26 14:49 ` Re: Newbie Query question Rod Taylor <pg@rbt.ca>
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread

From: Marcel Loose @ 2004-03-23 09:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: pgsql-sql

Hi all,

I have the following problem which I will illustrate with a simplified
example.

I have two tables A and B. Both tables contain three columns named "objid",
"owner", and "val" all of type integer. I want to select all records in A
for which A.val=0 and all records in B for which both B.val=0 and
B.owner=A.objid. I thought that the following query would work:

	SELECT * FROM A,B WHERE (A.VAL = 0) OR (B.VAL = 0 AND B.OWNER = A.OBJID);

However, this query does not give me the result I expected. It appears that
the database engine first calculates the cartesian product of the tables A
and B and then evaluates the query. Hence, I get multiple matches for
A.VAL=0 (N times the number of matching records in table A, where N is the
number of records in table B). I had hoped I could somehow coerce the
database engine to only use table A when evaluating the first part of the
query, and use both tables A and B when evaluating the second part of the
query. 

Is there any way to do this, other than using UNION??


Kind regards,

	Marcel Loose (mailto loose at astron dot nl)




^ permalink  raw  reply  [nested|flat] 2+ messages in thread

* Re: Newbie Query question
  2004-03-23 09:56 Newbie Query question Marcel Loose <loose@astron.nl>
@ 2004-03-26 14:49 ` Rod Taylor <pg@rbt.ca>
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread

From: Rod Taylor @ 2004-03-26 14:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Marcel Loose <loose@astron.nl>; +Cc: pgsql-sql

> However, this query does not give me the result I expected. It appears that
> the database engine first calculates the cartesian product of the tables A
> and B and then evaluates the query. Hence, I get multiple matches for

Yup.. WHERE filters the results of the join.

> Is there any way to do this, other than using UNION??

This is what you want. I think you could come out with what you want in
other ways, but this is by far the most appropriate.




^ permalink  raw  reply  [nested|flat] 2+ messages in thread


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2004-03-23 09:56 Newbie Query question Marcel Loose <loose@astron.nl>
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