I'm viewing a table in my command line but I'm not sure how it's sorted:
I use the TABLE "Notification"; command to display the rows in the table. Any tips on how to sort the display of this table? All my searches show how to sort a table result in a actual postgres query.
To sort the rows by a certain order the ORDER BY is used.
For example (In your case):
SELECT id, watched FROM schema_name.notification ORDER BY id ASC;
This will sort the table by id ascending, but it can also be sorted decending by using DESC instead of ASC.
I hope this helps.
Related
I have a table with the following columns:
ID (VARCHAR)
CUSTOMER_ID (VARCHAR)
STATUS (VARCHAR) (4 different status possible)
other not relevant columns
I try to find all the lines with customer_id = and status = two different status.
The query looks like:
SELECT *
FROM my_table
WHERE customer_id = '12345678' AND status IN ('STATUS1', 'STATUS2');
The table contains about 1 mio lines. I added two indexes on customer_id and status. The query still needs about 1 second to run.
The explain plan is:
1. Gather
2. Seq Scan on my_table
Filter: (((status)::text = ANY ('{SUBMITTED,CANCELLED}'::text[])) AND ((customer_id)::text = '12345678'::text))
I ran the 'analyze my_table' after creating the indexes. What could I do to improve the performance of this quite simple query?
You need a compound (multi-column) index to help satisfy your query.
Guessing, it seems like the most selective column (the one with the most distinct values) is customer_id. status probably has only a few distinct values. So customer_id should go first in the index. Try this.
ALTER TABLE my_table ADD INDEX customer_id_status (customer_id, status);
This creates a BTREE index. A useful mental model for such an index is an old-fashioned telephone book. It's sorted in order. You look up the first matching entry in the index, then scan it sequentially for the items you want.
You may also want to try running ANALYZE my_table; to update the statistics (about selectivity) used by the query planner to choose an appropriate index.
Pro tip Avoid SELECT * if you can. Instead name the columns you want. This can help performance a lot.
Pro tip Your question said some of your columns aren't relevant to query optimization. That's probably not true; index design is a weird art. SELECT * makes it less true.
I have a table contains columns 'employeename' and 'id', how can I sort the 'employeename' column following alphabetical order of the names initial?
Say the table is like this now:
employeename rid eid
Dave 1 1
Ben 4 2
Chloe 6 6
I tried the command ORDER BY, it shows what I want but when I query the data again by SELECT, the showed table data is the same as original, indicting ORDER BY does not modify the data, is this correct?
SELECT *
FROM employee
ORDER BY employeename ASC;
I expect the table data to be modified (sorted by names alphabetical order) like this:
employeename rid eid
Ben 4 2
Chloe 6 6
Dave 1 1
the showed table data is the same as original, indicting ORDER BY does not modify the data, is this correct?
Yes, this is correct. A SELECT statement does not change the data in a table. Only UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT or TRUNCATE statements will change the data.
However, your question shows a misconception on how a relational database works.
Rows in a table (of a relational database) are not sorted in any way. You can picture them as balls in a basket.
If you want to display data in a specific sort order, the only (really: the only) way to do that is to use an ORDER BY in your SELECT statement. There is no alternative to that.
Postgres allows to define a VIEW that includes an ORDER BY which might be an acceptable workaround for you:
CREATE VIEW sorted_employee;
AS
SELECT *
FROM employee
ORDER BY employeename ASC;
Then you can simply use
select *
from sorted_employees;
But be aware of the drawbacks. If you run select * from sorted_employees order by id then the data will be sorted twice. Postgres is not smart enough to remove the (useless) order by from the view's definition.
Some related questions:
Default row order in SELECT query - SQL Server 2008 vs SQL 2012
What is the default SQL result sort order with 'select *'?
Is PostgreSQL order fully guaranteed if sorting on a non-unique attribute?
Why do results from a SQL query not come back in the order I expect?
I have to sort one column of mytable in ascending order but problem is mytable contains some special characters related data. Still I want to sort in ascending order so that it display in proper manner in UI.
Can anyone help me with this?
I have tried using
ORDER BY Item DESC
But it gives me first ABC type rows then {ABC} type rows.Means giving special characters in last
You can try this for your problem :
select * from mytable ORDER BY REGEXP_REPLACE(Item,'[^[:alnum:]'' '']', NULL) DESC
I have PostgreSQL table:
Username1 SomeBytes1
Username2 SomeBytes1
Username1 SomeBytes1
Username1 SomeBytes1
I need to get some rows from with name Username1 but from the end of the table. For example i need last to rows with Username1
select from my_table where user = Username1 LIMIT 2
Gives me first 2 rows, but i need last two.
How can i select it?
Thank you.
first and last in a table is very arbitrary. In order to have a good predictable result you should always have an order by clause. And if you have that, then getting the last two rows will become easy.
For instance, if you have a primary key or something like an ID (which is populated by a sequence), then you can do:
select * from my_table where user = 'Username1' order by ID desc limit 2.
desc tells the database to sort the rows in reverse order, which means that last will be first.
Does your table have a primary key ? / Can your table be sorted?
Because the notion of 'first' and 'last' implies some sorting of the tuples. If this is the case, you could sort the data the other way around, so that your 'last' entries are on top. Then you can access them with the statement you tried.
To view tail of a table you may use ctid. It is a temporary physical identifier of a record in PostgreSQL.
SELECT * from my_table
WHERE user = Username1
ORDER BY ctid DESC
LIMIT 2
i have image table, which has 2 or more rows with same date.. now im tring to do order by created_date DESC, which works fine and shows rows same position, but when i change the query and try again, it shows different positions.. and no i dont have any other order by field, so im bit confused on why its doing it and how can i fix it.
can you please help on this.
To get reproducible results you need to have columns in your order by clause that together are unique. Do you have an ID column? You can use that to tie-break:
ORDER BY created_date DESC, id
I suspect that this is happening because MySQL is not given any ordering information other than ORDER BY created_date DESC, so it does whatever is most convenient for MySQL depending on its complicated inner workings (caching, indexing, etc.). Assuming you have a unique key id, you could do:
SELECT * FROM table t ORDER BY t.created_date DESC, t.id ASC
Which would give you the same result every time because putting a comma in the arguments following ORDER BY gives it a secondary ordering rule that is executed when the first ordering rule doesn't produce a clear order between two rows.
To have consistent results, you will need to add at least more column to the 'ORDER BY' clause. Since the values in the created_date column are not unique, there is not a defined order. If you wanted that column to be 'unique', you could define it as a timestamp.