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Thread: Question regarding 'not in' and subselects

Question regarding 'not in' and subselects

From
Vic Ricker
Date:
Hi.  I'm using PostgreSQL 7.4.2 under Fedora Core 1.

I have two tables with a single varchar(32) column in each.  I'm trying
to find all the rows from one table that don't exist in the other
table.  The query that I am using is:

select u.user_name from users u where u.user_name not in (select
user_name from iasusers);

(Actually, I'm doing something a bit more complex but this illustrates
the problem.)

It always seems to return 0 rows.  As a test, I inserted a row into
users that I knew wasn't in iasuses but it didn't make a difference.

If I remove the 'not', the query returns the rows that exist in both
tables.

If I replace the subselect with a list, it seems to work the way that
I'd expect, i.e. "not in ('vic', 'joe')" it shows all the rows from
users except for vic and joe.

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Thanks,
-Vic

Re: Question regarding 'not in' and subselects

From
Bruno Wolff III
Date:
On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 13:57:37 -0400,
  Vic Ricker <vicricker@charter.net> wrote:
> Hi.  I'm using PostgreSQL 7.4.2 under Fedora Core 1.
>
> I have two tables with a single varchar(32) column in each.  I'm trying
> to find all the rows from one table that don't exist in the other
> table.  The query that I am using is:
>
> select u.user_name from users u where u.user_name not in (select
> user_name from iasusers);
>
> (Actually, I'm doing something a bit more complex but this illustrates
> the problem.)
>
> It always seems to return 0 rows.  As a test, I inserted a row into
> users that I knew wasn't in iasuses but it didn't make a difference.
>
> If I remove the 'not', the query returns the rows that exist in both
> tables.
>
> If I replace the subselect with a list, it seems to work the way that
> I'd expect, i.e. "not in ('vic', 'joe')" it shows all the rows from
> users except for vic and joe.
>
> Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Are there any nulls in iasusers.user_name?

Re: Question regarding 'not in' and subselects

From
Vic Ricker
Date:
On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 14:38, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 13:57:37 -0400,
>   Vic Ricker <vicricker@charter.net> wrote:
> > Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?
>
> Are there any nulls in iasusers.user_name?

There was a null in iasusers.  I removed it and that fixed the problem.
I'm not sure that I understand why.  It doesn't seem very intuitive...
:-)

Tom Innes's suggestion of:

select u.user_name from users u where u.user_name not in (select
user_name from iasusers ia where ia.user_name = u.user_name);

also worked.

Thanks guys!

--
Vic Ricker
http://www.ricker.us/