Description
Given three tables: salesperson
, company
, orders
.
Output all the names in the table salesperson
, who didn’t have sales to company 'RED'.
Example
Input
Table: salesperson
+----------+------+--------+-----------------+-----------+ | sales_id | name | salary | commission_rate | hire_date | +----------+------+--------+-----------------+-----------+ | 1 | John | 100000 | 6 | 4/1/2006 | | 2 | Amy | 120000 | 5 | 5/1/2010 | | 3 | Mark | 65000 | 12 | 12/25/2008| | 4 | Pam | 25000 | 25 | 1/1/2005 | | 5 | Alex | 50000 | 10 | 2/3/2007 | +----------+------+--------+-----------------+-----------+The table
salesperson
holds the salesperson information. Every salesperson has a sales_id and a name.
Table: company
+---------+--------+------------+ | com_id | name | city | +---------+--------+------------+ | 1 | RED | Boston | | 2 | ORANGE | New York | | 3 | YELLOW | Boston | | 4 | GREEN | Austin | +---------+--------+------------+The table
company
holds the company information. Every company has a com_id and a name.
Table: orders
+----------+----------+---------+----------+--------+ | order_id | date | com_id | sales_id | amount | +----------+----------+---------+----------+--------+ | 1 | 1/1/2014 | 3 | 4 | 100000 | | 2 | 2/1/2014 | 4 | 5 | 5000 | | 3 | 3/1/2014 | 1 | 1 | 50000 | | 4 | 4/1/2014 | 1 | 4 | 25000 | +----------+----------+---------+----------+--------+The table
orders
holds the sales record information, salesperson and customer company are represented by sales_id and com_id.
output
+------+ | name | +------+ | Amy | | Mark | | Alex | +------+
Explanation
According to order '3' and '4' in table orders
, it is easy to tell only salesperson 'John' and 'Alex' have sales to company 'RED',so we need to output all the other names in table salesperson
.
OUTER JOIN
and NOT IN
[Accepted]Intuition
If we know all the persons who have sales in this company 'RED', it will be fairly easy to know who do not have.
Algorithm
To start, we can query the information of sales in company 'RED' as a temporary table. And then try to build a connection between this table and the salesperson table since it has the name information.
SELECT * FROM orders o LEFT JOIN company c ON o.com_id = c.com_id WHERE c.name = 'RED' ;
Note: "LEFT OUTER JOIN" could be written as "LEFT JOIN".
| order_id | date | com_id | sales_id | amount | com_id | name | city | |----------|----------|--------|----------|--------|--------|------|--------| | 3 | 3/1/2014 | 1 | 1 | 50000 | 1 | RED | Boston | | 4 | 4/1/2014 | 1 | 4 | 25000 | 1 | RED | Boston |
Obviously, the column sales_id exists in table salesperson so we may use it as a subquery, and then utilize the NOT IN
to get the target data.
MySQL
SELECT s.name FROM salesperson s WHERE s.sales_id NOT IN (SELECT o.sales_id FROM orders o LEFT JOIN company c ON o.com_id = c.com_id WHERE c.name = 'RED') ;