I'm looking over some UniData fields for distinct values but I'm hoping to find a simpler way of doing it. The values aren't keys to anything so right now I'm selecting the records I'm interested in and selecting the data I need with SAVING UNIQUE. The problem is, in order to see what I have all I know to do is save it out to a savedlist and then read through the savedlist file I created.
Is there a way to see the contents of a select without running it against a file?
If you are just wanted to visually look over the data, use LIST instead of SELECT.
The general syntax of the command is something like:
LIST filename WITH [criteria] [sort] [attributes | ALL]
So let's say you have a table called questions and want to look over all the author for questions that used the tag unidata. Your query might look something like:
LIST questions WITH tag = "unidata" BY author author
Note: The second author isn't a mistake, it's the start of the list of attributes you want displayed - in this case just author, but you might want the record id as well, so you could do #ID author instead. Or just do ALL to display everything in each record.
I did BY author here as it will make spotting uniques easier, but you can also use other query features like BREAK.ON to help here as well.
I don't know why I didn't think of it at the time but I basically needed something like SQL's DISTINCT statement since I just needed to view the unique values. Replicating DISTINCT in UniData is explained here, https://forum.precisonline.com/index.php?topic=318.0.
The trick is to sort on the values using BY, get a single unique value of each using BREAK-ON, and then suppress everything except those unique values using DET-SUP.
LIST BUILDINGS BY CITY BREAK-ON CITY DET-SUP
CITY.............
Albuquerque
Arlington
Ashland
Clinton
Franklin
Greenville
Madison
Milton
Springfield
Washington
Related
My department uses a software tool that can use a custom component library sourced from Tables or Queries in an MS Access database.
Table: Components
ID: AutoNumber
Type: String
Mfg: String
P/N: String
...
Query: Resistors
SELECT Components.*
FROM Components
WHERE Components.Type = "Resistors"
Query: Capacitors
SELECT Components.*
FROM Components
WHERE Components.Type = "Capacitors"
These queries work fine for SELECT. But when users add a row to the query, how can I ensure the correct value is saved to the Type field?
Edit #2:
Nope, can't be done. Sorry.
Edit #1:
As was pointed out, I may have misunderstood the question. It's not a wonky question after all, but perhaps an easy one?
If you're asking how to add records to your table while making sure that, for example, "the record shows up in a Resistors query if it's a Resistor", then it's a regular append query, that specifies Resisitors as your Type.
For example:
INSERT INTO Components ( ID, Type, Mfg )
SELECT 123, 'Resistors', 'Company XYZ'
If you've already tried that and are having problems, it could be because you are using a Reserved Word as a field name which, although it may work sometimes, can cause problems in unexpected ways.
Type is a word that Access, SQL and VBA all use for a specific purpose. It's the same idea as if you used SELECT and FROM as field or table names. (SELECT SELECT FROM FROM).
Here is a list of reserved words that should generally be avoided. (I realize it's labelled Access 2007 but the list is very similar, and it's surprisingly difficult to find an recent 'official' list for Excel VBA.)
Original Answer:
That's kind a a wonky way to do things. The point of databases is to organize in such a way as to prevent duplication of not only data, but queries and codes as well
I made up the programming rule for my own use "If you're doing anything more than once, you're doing it wrong." (That's not true in all cases but a general rule of thumb nonetheless.)
Are the only options "Resistors" and "Capacitors"? (...I hope you're not tracking the inventory of an electronics supply store...) If there are may options, that's even more reason to find an alternative method.
To answer your question, in the Query Design window, it is not possible to return the name of the open query.
Some alternative options:
As #Erik suggested, constrain to a control on a form. Perhaps have a drop-down or option buttons which the user can select the relevant type. Then your query would look like:
SELECT * FROM Components WHERE Type = 'Forms![YourFormName]![NameOfYourControl]'
In VBA, have the query refer to the value of a variable, foe example:
Dim TypeToDel as String
TypeToDel = "Resistor"
DoCmd.RunSQL "SELECT * FROM Components WHERE Type = '" & typeToDel'"
Not recommended, but you could have the user manually enter the criteria. If your query is like this:
SELECT * FROM Components WHERE Type = '[Enter the component type]'
...then each time the query is run, it will prompt:
Similarly, you could have the query prompt for an option, perhaps a single-digit or a code, and have the query choose the the appropriate criteria:
...and have an IF statement in the query criteria.
SELECT *
FROM Components
WHERE Type = IIf([Enter 1 for Resistors, 2 for Capacitors, 3 for sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads]=1,'Resistors',IIf([Enter 1 for Resistors, 2 for Capacitors, 3 for sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads]=2,'Capacitors','LaserSharks'));
Note that if you're going to have more than 2 options, you'll need to have the parameter box more than once, and they must be spelled identically.
Lastly, if you're still going to take the route of a separate query for each component type, as long as you're making separate queries anyway, why not just put a static value in each one (just like your example):
SELECT * FROM Components WHERE Type = 'Resistor'
There's another wonky answer here but that's just creating even more duplicate information (and more future mistakes).
Side note: Type is a reserved word in Access & VBA; you might be best to choose another. (I usually prefix with a related letter like cType.)
More Information:
Use parameters in queries, forms, and reports
Use parameters to ask for input when running a query
Microsoft Access Tips & Tricks: Parameter Queries
• Frickin' Lasers
I have 2 column in my table setting
with the following values
KEY VALUE
company ABC
phone 14344
address Somerset City
I need to display this like a single record or a flatten
array in the view/blade page
something like
{{$sett->company}}
{{$sett->phone}}
or an array with lookup
{{$myarray('company')}}
{{$myarray('phone')}}
The idea is if I add another settings like contact us email address
for my website I don't want to add another column.
I know this is achievable in controller by creating different variable
and executing different query but I'm kind of looking for some options here.
Thanks for the help really appreciated.
You can use $settings->pluck('value', 'key') to get your result. Read more here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/collections#method-pluck
I'm working on the postgresql 8.4 source code. I need to extrapolate the qualifiers (where part) from the query.
For example if the query is: select name from student where age > 18
I need to know "age" and "18".
I've already took the target list, and the range list in this way
Query *query_idr = (Query *)linitial(querytree_list);
ListCell *l;
ListCell *tl;
foreach(l, query_idr->rtable){
Oid tab_idT = ((RangeTblEntry *) lfirst(l)) ->relid;
}
foreach(tl, query_idr->targetList){
TargetEntry *tle = (TargetEntry *) lfirst(tl);
Oid col_id = tle->resorigtbl;
}
and it works, and I've got the id of the table student (with the first foreach) and id of name column (with the second foreach), but I can't understand how I have to take the qualifier.
Here is the navigable Query structure http://doxygen.postgresql.org/structQuery.html
I doubt you are going to get an answer here. In general hacking the PostgreSQL source code is not likely to have enough people here who can answer it that a general site like this will be helpful. However rather than leave this withough any such resources I would like to reply to provide a list of resources for answering questions like this one as well as my reading of the docs as someone with quite a bit of experience buildign things on Pg.
In essence what you are trying to do is navigate through the parse tree of the query. It looks to me like the setOperations member might be the place to look just because I can't think of anywhere else and because this might help with both join conditions and where clause filters (remember these are considered interchangeable by the planner). However I have little experience in this area and so I could be wrong.
I would entirely second the suggestion that the pgsql-hackers list is likely to be the best place to ask this sort of question. You will probably get a better answer there.
Consider an e-commerce application with multiple stores. Each store owner can edit the item catalog of his store.
My current database schema is as follows:
item_names: id | name | description | picture | common(BOOL)
items: id | item_name_id | picture | price | description | picture
item_synonyms: id | item_name_id | name | error(BOOL)
Notes: error indicates a wrong spelling (eg. "Ericson"). description and picture of the item_names table are "globals" that can optionally be overridden by "local" description and picture fields of the items table (in case the store owner wants to supply a different picture for an item). common helps separate unique item names ("Jimmy Joe's Cheese Pizza" from "Cheese Pizza")
I think the bright side of this schema is:
Optimized searching & Handling Synonyms: I can query the item_names & item_synonyms tables using name LIKE %QUERY% and obtain the list of item_name_ids that need to be joined with the items table. (Examples of synonyms: "Sony Ericsson", "Sony Ericson", "X10", "X 10")
Autocompletion: Again, a simple query to the item_names table. I can avoid the usage of DISTINCT and it minimizes number of variations ("Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X10", "Sony Ericsson - Xperia X10", "Xperia X10, Sony Ericsson")
The down side would be:
Overhead: When inserting an item, I query item_names to see if this name already exists. If not, I create a new entry. When deleting an item, I count the number of entries with the same name. If this is the only item with that name, I delete the entry from the item_names table (just to keep things clean; accounts for possible erroneous submissions). And updating is the combination of both.
Weird Item Names: Store owners sometimes use sentences like "Harry Potter 1, 2 Books + CDs + Magic Hat". There's something off about having so much overhead to accommodate cases like this. This would perhaps be the prime reason I'm tempted to go for a schema like this:
items: id | name | picture | price | description | picture
(... with item_names and item_synonyms as utility tables that I could query)
Is there a better schema you would suggested?
Should item names be normalized for autocomplete? Is this probably what Facebook does for "School", "City" entries?
Is the first schema or the second better/optimal for search?
Thanks in advance!
References: (1) Is normalizing a person's name going too far?, (2) Avoiding DISTINCT
EDIT: In the event of 2 items being entered with similar names, an Admin who sees this simply clicks "Make Synonym" which will convert one of the names into the synonym of the other. I don't require a way to automatically detect if an entered name is the synonym of the other. I'm hoping the autocomplete will take care of 95% of such cases. As the table set increases in size, the need to "Make Synonym" will decrease. Hope that clears the confusion.
UPDATE: To those who would like to know what I went ahead with... I've gone with the second schema but removed the item_names and item_synonyms tables in hopes that Solr will provide me with the ability to perform all the remaining tasks I need:
items: id | name | picture | price | description | picture
Thanks everyone for the help!
The requirements you state in your comment ("Optimized searching", "Handling Synonyms" and "Autocomplete") are not things that are generally associated with an RDBMS. It sounds like what you're trying to solve is a searching problem, not a data storage and normalization problem. You might want to start looking at some search architectures like Solr
Excerpted from the solr feature list:
Faceted Searching based on unique field values, explicit queries, or date ranges
Spelling suggestions for user queries
More Like This suggestions for given document
Auto-suggest functionality
Performance Optimizations
If there were more attributes exposed for mapping, I would suggest using a fast search index system. No need to set aliases up as the records are added, the attributes simply get indexed and each search issued returns matches with a relevance score. Take the top X% as valid matches and display those.
Creating and storing aliases seems like a brute-force, labor intensive approach that probably won't be able to adjust to the needs of your users.
Just an idea.
One thing that comes to my mind is sorting the characters in the name and synonym throwing away all white space. This is similar to the solution of finding all anagrams for a word. The end result is ability to quickly find similar entries. As you pointed out, all synonyms should converge into one single term, or name. The search is performed against synonyms using again sorted input string.
So, I have an autocomplete dropdown with a list of townships. Initially I just had the 20 or so that we had in the database... but recently, we have noticed that some of our data lies in other counties... even other states. So, the answer to that was buy one of those databases with all towns in the US (yes, I know, geocoding is the answer but due to time constraints we are doing this until we have time for that feature).
So, when we had 20-25 towns the autocomplete worked stellarly... now that there are 80,000 it's not as easy.
As I type I am thinking that the best way to do this is default to this state, then there will be much less. I will add a state selector to the page that defaults to NJ then you can pick another state if need be, this will narrow down the list to < 1000. Though, I may have the same issue? Does anyone know of a work around for an autocomplete with a lot of data?
should I post teh codez of my webservice?
Are you trying to autocomplete after only 1 character is typed? Maybe wait until 2 or more...?
Also, can you just return the top 10 rows, or something?
Sounds like your application is suffocating on the amount of data being returned, and then attempted to be rendered by the browser.
I assume that your database has the proper indexes, and you don't have a performance problem there.
I would limit the results of your service to no more than say 100 results. Users will not look at any more than that any how.
I would also only being retrieving the data from the service once 2 or 3 characters are entered which will further reduce the scope of the query.
Good Luck!
Stupid question maybe, but... have you checked to make sure you have an index on the town name column? I wouldn't think 80K names should be stressing your database...
I think you're on the right track. Use a series of cascading inputs, State -> County -> Township where each succeeding one grabs the potential population based on the value of the preceding one. Each input would validate against its potential population to avoid spurious inputs. I would suggest caching the intermediate results and querying against them for the autocomplete instead of going all the way back to the database each time.
If you have control of the underlying SQL, you may want to try several "UNION" queries instead of one query with several "OR like" lines in its where clause.
Check out this article on optimizing SQL.
I'd just limit the SQL query with a TOP clause. I also like using a "less than" instead of a like:
select top 10 name from cities where #partialname < name order by name;
that "Ce" will give you "Cedar Grove" and "Cedar Knolls" but also "Chatham" & "Cherry Hill" so you always get ten.
In LINQ:
var q = (from c in db.Cities
where partialname < c.Name
orderby c.Name
select c.Name).Take(10);