Question

I have one table that holds my ressources:

Ressource | Ressource-ID

And a table that holds the associations

Ressource-ID | Employee-ID

How to select the ressources of an Employee that are available, i.e. not in the association table?

I’ve tried this, but it’s not working:

select r.ress, r.ress_id
FROM Ressource r
LEFT outer JOIN Ressource_Employee_Association a ON r.ress_id = a.ress_id
WHERE a.emp_id = 'ID00163efea66b' and a.ress_id IS NULL

Any ideas?

Thanks
Thomas

Answer 1

After writing my above comments, and looking at the proposed solutions: I think I’ve got some more understanding of what you are trying to do.

Assuming you have unlimited quantity of resources in your resources table, you want to select the un-assigned resources per employee (based on their non-existence for any specific employee in the resource association table).

In order to accomplish this (and get a comprehensive list of employees) you’ll need a 3rd table, in order to reference the complete list of employees. You’ll also need to CROSS JOIN all of the resources onto the list of employees (assuming every employee has access to every resource), then you LEFT JOIN (LEFT OUTER JOIN whatever) your association list onto the query where the resource_id and employee_id match the resource_id in the resources table, and the employee_id in the employees table (respectively). THEN you add your where clause that filters out all the records that assign an employee to a resource. This leaves you with the resources that are available to the employee, which they also do not have signed out. This is convoluted to say, so hopefully the query sheds more light:

SELECT e.employee_id, e.employee, r.res_id, r.res

FROM employees e
CROSS JOIN resources r
LEFT JOIN assigned_resources ar
    ON ar.employee_id = e.employee_id AND r.res_id = ar.res_id

WHERE ar.res_id IS NULL

If you don’t have an employees table, you can accomplish the same by using the assigned resources table, but you will be limited to selecting employees who already have some resources allocated. You’ll need to add a GROUP BY query because of the possible existence of multiple employee definitions in the association table. Here’s what that query would look like:

SELECT e.employee_id, r.res_id, r.res

FROM assigned_resources e
CROSS JOIN resources r
LEFT JOIN assigned_resources ar
    ON ar.employee_id = e.employee_id AND r.res_id = ar.res_id

WHERE ar.res_id IS NULL

GROUP BY e.employee_id, r.res_id