Question

For simplification, I have two tables related with one to many using a foreign key, for example:

Users table:
id
name

Actions table:
id
user_id

one user may have many actions or not. I need an sql select that returns users ids that don’t have a user_id value in the actions table.

Users Table:
id      name
1       John
2       Smith
3       Alice

Actions Table:
id      user_id
1       3
2       1

So I need an sql query that returns the user id 2 (Smith) because the foreign key values don’t include the id 2

I tried the following SQL, but it returns all users ids:

SELECT users.id from users left join actions on actions.user_id is null

Answer 1

select u.id
from users u
left outer join actions a on a.user_id = u.id
where a.user_id is null