Question

I am trying to run a query that for a selected person, it will recommend items based on their purchase history and what other people have bought who also bought that item.

Example:

Customer 1 purchases item A, and B.
Customer 2 purchases item B. 
Customer 2 is recommended, item A.  

I have 4 tables that are used in this I will list them with the relevant row names.

Customer
PK: Cust_ID

Session
PK: Ses_ID
FK: Cust_ID

Order
PK: Order_ID
FK: ItemRef_ID
FK: Session_ID

Item
PK: Item_ID

I’m pretty new to SQL but here’s what I’ve got so far, following that I really have no idea how to go about doing it.

Currently it only gives the items that the selected customer has bought ‘Lani Morgan’, but instead I’d like it to display items that other customers have bought, who have bought the item ‘Lani Morgan’ has bought.

SELECT Item_Desc, Item_ID 
FROM  rbickers.Item

LEFT JOIN rbickers.Order 
ON Item.Item_id = Order.itemref_id 

LEFT join rbickers.Session 
ON Order.Session_id = Session.Ses_id 

left join rbickers.customer
On customer.cust_ID = session.Cust_ID

Where Cust_First = "Lani" and Cust_Last = "Morgan"

GROUP BY Item_Type

LIMIT 10 

Any help would really be appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

So by your basic version and with the supplied schema, the way I see it implemented is by checking for every item, if not bought by customer1, but bought by any other customer buying items customer1 has bought.
Since this schema requires you to join through all of the given tables, I’d ask you to create a view of the join you’ve provided:

create view CustomerItems as 
SELECT *
FROM  rbickers.Item

LEFT JOIN rbickers.Order 
ON Item.Item_id = Order.itemref_id 

LEFT join rbickers.Session 
ON Order.Session_id = Session.Ses_id 

left join rbickers.customer
On customer.cust_ID = session.Cust_ID

#Where Cust_First = "Lani" and Cust_Last = "Morgan"

and then:

select distinct item.* from item, CustomerItems cust1 where 
cust1.Cust_First="Lani" and cust1.Cust_Last="Morgan" and 
item.Item_ID not in(
select Item_ID from CustomerItems cust2 where cust1.Cust_ID=cust2.Cust_ID) 
and exists(select * from CustomerItems cust3 where 
cust3.Cust_ID<>cust1.cust_ID and item.Item_ID=cust3.Item_ID);