Question

I have various tables like

Student
primary id , students name, course

Papers
paper id, papername, course, semester, type

StudentOptions
primary id, studentid (foreign key - reference student id) and paperid (foreign key - references paper id)

StudentsTerm
studentid (foreign key- references student id) and student semester

Now the kind of result i want is,

I want to choose a course then the term, which will give me the number of papers/subject it has with their types (Mandatory/Optional) and with that i want to have the count of number of students studying those papers from all these tables.

I don’t wanna create any view or stuff, Just a normal select query will do.

The query i am running is :

SELECT p_name,
       p_id,
       type,
       Count(sps.studentid) AS counts
FROM   students,
       str,
       papers
       LEFT JOIN sps
              ON sps.paperid = papers.p_id
WHERE  sps.studentid = students.studentid
       AND students.studentid = str.studentid
       AND sps.studentid = str.studentid
       AND str.semesterid = p_semid
       AND str.sessionid = 12
       AND students.course = c_id
       AND c_id = 6
       AND p_semid = 1
GROUP  BY p_id 

Answer 1

As better practice, if you are going to be using explicit JOIN syntax, then don’t use implicit syntax. In the query you posted above, you select from papers, but you don’t use it anywhere. Also, your column names are slightly ambiguous. If it’s easier, alias each table using a single letter, or explicitly prefix the column names. If you’re using an aggregate with GROUP BY, you cannot select columns which are not in the group.

Let’s assume this is your ER diagram:

Let’s first join all the tables:

SELECT a.id, a.name
FROM student a
JOIN str b ON b.student_id = a.id
JOIN sps c ON c.student_id = a.id
JOIN papers d ON d.id = c.paper_id

Now you wish to find the number of students studying papers from a specific course and type:

SELECT a.id, a.name
FROM student a
JOIN str b ON b.student_id = a.id
JOIN sps c ON c.student_id = a.id
JOIN papers d ON d.id = c.paper_id
WHERE b.semester = 12
    AND d.course = 6

Because your attributes are ambigiuous, it is hard to tell what tables they are coming from. If you can set up the structure and sample data on SQL Fiddle, we could help you better.