I'm trying to query an abbreviation of data I have in a column. For example, say I have all cities in the USA within a column. I want to query 'NY' and get back the row that has 'New York'. Is there any way to do this in Postgres?
There are various ways you could achieve this.
You could create a mapping table which holds they initials and state names in two columns. Then you could use join statement to join the two tables and use where condition on the mapping table initials column.
Second method is to use a select statement with a derived column from the states column. This derived table will have the initials of the states. You could first use split by space, use left(string) method to get the first alphabet and join them together. Now you could have a where condition on this new derived initials column. But the drawback here is that you will get only one initial if the state is one word only.
Related
I have a table with many columns (I know it's not good), but now I want to query the table but only need to group the results by only one of the column, so a general way is:
select table_name.id,
table_name.account_no,
....(all the other column name)
from table_name
where some conditions
group by table_name.bank_name
so I need to write all the other columns for this single query. I'm wondering if there's a better way to do that?
I have a table in PostgreSQL,
but the problem is that my data isn't organized in a proper data order.
For example, the first row of my table is '2017-05-30', and last row is '2017-02-23'.
So I want to "sort" my table by date.
I'm not asking about
SELECT * FROM MY_TABLE ORDER BY DATE;
I want to "update" my table.
How can I do this?
You can't sort a PostgreSQL table in the sense you ask.
In relational algebra, the order of the rows is unimportant and there is no guarantee that rows in a table are stored in any specific order. There is also no way to ensure that rows are returned in a particular order unless you specify the order specifically e.g. by using the ORDER BY. Otherwise, you shouldn't rely on the order of the returned rows.
As pointed out the in comments, RDBMS may rearrange the order of rows in query results for optimization purposes and so on.
You can, if you like, add a new sequence number field using row_number() indicating the ranks of rows with respect to your order (e.g. the date field).
I'm new to PostgreSQL.
I was wondering, how do I make a column a drop down list.
So i've got a table called Student. There's a column in there called "student_type", which means whether the student is a part time student, full time student or is sandwich course student.
So I want to make "student_type" a drop down list with 3 choices: "part time" student, "full time" and "sandwich".
How do I do this?
(I'm using pgAdmin to create the databse, by the way.)
A drop-down is a client side thing and should be dealt with accordingly. But as far as a relational database is involved there should exist a student_type relation with the id and type columns which you would query like this:
select st.id, st.type
from student_type st
inner join student s on s.type_id = st.id
group by st.id, st.type
order by st.type
The inner join is to make sure you don't show an option that does not exist in the student table and would therefore produce an empty result if chosen. In the client side the id should be the option value and the type the option text.
If there is no student_type relation as a consequence of bad db design or if you are only allowed to query a denormalized view, you can still use the student relation:
select distinct student_type
from student
order by student_type
In this case the student_type will be both the option value and the option text.
I think You use MS Access before. It is not possible to create such a drop-down list using pgAdmin, but it is possible to limit acceptable values in field "student_type" in a few different ways. Still, this will not be a drop-down or Combobox filed.
eg:
You can use a table with a dictionary and then use a foreign key,
You can use the constraint to check the inserted value
You can use a domain (the field is in the type of Your domain, and the domain is based on
proper constraint)
You can use trigger (before insert or update)
etc.
To put this a different way, Postgres is a database, not a user-interface
library. It doesn't have dropdown lists, text boxes, labels and all that. It is not directly usable by a human that way.
What PG can do is provide a stable source for data used by such widgets. Each widget library has its own rules for how to bind (that is, connect) to a data source. Some let you directly connect the visual component, in this case, the dropdown widget, to a database, or better, a database cursor.
With Postgres, you can create a cursor, which is an in-memory window into the result of a SELECT query of some kind, that your widget or favorite programming language binds to. In your example, the cursor or widget binding would be to the result of a "SELECT student_type FROM student_type" query.
As an aside, the values for "student_type" should not be stored only in
"student". You should have a normalized table structure, which here would give you a "student_type" table that holds the three choices, one per row. (There
are other ways to do this.) The values you specified would be the primary key column. (Alternatively, you'd have those values in a UNIQUE column with a
surrogate key as the primary key, but that's probably overkilling for a simple
lookup table.) The "student.student_type" column would then be a foreign key
into the "student_type.student_type" column.
I have to display a column name from a select query from table, e,g, 'Column 1' is stored in table table1, I want to display 'Column 1' as column name. I cannot hardcode 'Column 1' as it might be unknown when the code is developed.
Column 1 Column 2
a b
Any idea?
Update
It allows user to define column name.
It has to generate via T SQL
Add alias as a separate column or use dynamic SQL
This doesn't make sense because doing you should know what the column is called: you don't store information about columns and build queries on your own metadata
IF you don't know the name of the column at design time, then use a resource file or similar in the presentation layer to hold the value that you will display as the label for column1. It should be noted, however, you are going to have a very hard time writing any code if you don't know the names of the columns in your database, unless you are select * on everything.
Column names are fairly restricted and should be named with the SQL admin and application developer as the user of the names. It is not the intent of a column name to be descriptor for the end user interface.
Select dbColumn1 as [Customer Name] from tableMain
Even that is not a good practice and then user input is part of the TSQL and you are opening yourself up to SQL injection attacks and it is just not very good control on you query. A better practice is to pass parameters.
I need to create a report that shows, for each master row, two sets of child (detail) rows. In database terms you can think of this as table 'A' having a 1:M relationship to table 'B' and also a 1:M relationship to table 'C'. So, for each row from table 'A', I want to display a list of child rows from 'B' (preferably in one section) and a list of child rows from 'C' (preferably in another section). I would also prefer to avoid the use of sub-reports, if possible. How can I best accomplish this?
Thanks.
I think I understand your question correctly, ie for a given row in Table A, you want the details section(s) to show all connected rows in Table B and then all connected rows in Table C (for any number of rows in B or C, including zero). I only know of two solutions to this, neither of which is straightforward.
The first is, as you've guessed, the disliked subreport option.
The second involves some additional work in the database; specifically, creating a view that combines the entries in Table B and Table C into one table, which can then be used in the main report as a linkable object to report on and you can group on Table A as desired. How straightforward this is will depend on how similar the structures of B and C are. If they were effectively identical, the view could contain something simple like
SELECT 'B' AS DetailType, Field1, Field2, FieldLinkedToTableA
FROM TableB
UNION ALL
SELECT 'C' AS DetailType, Field1, Field2, FieldLinkedToTableA
FROM TAbleC
However, neither option will scale well to reports with lots of results (unless your server supports indexing the view).
This is exactly what Crystal was made for :)
Make a blank .rpt and connect to your data sources as you normally would.
Go to Report->Group Expert and choose your grouping field (aka Index field).
You will now see a Group Header section in your design view. This is your "Master row". The Details sections will be your "Child rows".
In the example image below, this file is grouped by {Client}. For client "ZZZZ", there are 2 records, so there are 2 details sections while all the other clients only have 1 details section.
Edit
Based on your response, how about this:
In your datasource (or perhaps using some kind of intermediary like MS Access), start SQLing as follows.
Make a subquery left joining the primary key of TblA and the foreign key of TblB. Add a third column containing a constant, e.g. "TblB"
Make a subquery left joining the primary key of TblA and the foreign key of TblC. Add a third column containing a different constant, e.g. "TblC"
Union those 2 queries together. That'll be your "index table" of your crystal report.
In Crystal, you can have multiple grouping levels. So group first by your constant column, then by the TblA primary key, then by the foreign key.
This way, all the results from TblB will be displayed first, then TblC. And with a little work, tables B & C won't even have to have the same field definitions.
You can use or create columns that are used for grouping, then group on the table A column, then the table B column, then C. (Crystal's group is not the same as t-sql "group by". In Crystal, it's more of a sorting than a grouping.)