Question

I’ve come here for help with a complicated query. I’ve tried a lot of different things for this and not quite got the results that I want. A watered down version of my schema is as follows: The three tables in question are an Employees Table, an EmployeeTraining Table, and a RequiredTraining table. The employees table holds information of an employee, such as empID,name, address, email, positionWorked, etc etc. The EmployeeTraining table holds an empID, and TrainingName.The RequiredTraining table has a Position and TrainingName.

Employees: empID,
Name,
Position

EmployeeTraining: empID,
trainingName

requiredTraining: Position,
trainingName

Here’s some sample data, just to further clarify:

Employees

              *EMPID~~Name~~Position~~
                  1      Ted     Accountant

                  2      Bob     Janitor

employeeTraining

                 **empID~~TrainingName**
                    1          Crunching Numbers

                    1          Microsoft Excel

                    1          Using an Abicus

                    2          Lemon Pledge 100

                    2          Scrubbing Toilets

requiredTraining

                  **position**~~**TrainingName**


                    Accountant    Crunching Numbers

                    Accountant    Microsoft Excel

                    Accountant    Using an Abicus

                    Accountant    TPS Reports

                    Janitor       Lemon Pledge 100

                    Janitor       Scrubbing Toilets

In english, and in the long run, I want to select an employee from a form and have a subform showing all of the training completed from that employee(SELECT * FROM Employees INNER JOIn EmployeeTraining on employees.empid = employeetraining.empID WHERE empID = me.empID)

I also want another subform that shows the training that an employee has NOT completed that is required for their current position. This is where I am struggling. I am not familiar or comfortable with using MS Access’s query builder, but I have tried “find unmatched” queries as well as trying to write my own. This seems like a MINUS operation would work, but MS Access doesn’t support MINUS. I have tried a LEFT JOIN with a null predicate as well as a NOT IN from the above query to a query of the requiredTraining table, but I haven’t got the results I’m looking for.

For example, the result of the query I’m trying to write for this sample data would be:

for employeeID 1 (Ted the Accountant)

ted needs “TPS Reports” training

for employee 2 ( Bob the Janitor)

Bob has completed all of his training for his position.

An example of an attempted query I am trying is:

      SELECT employees.position,employeeTraining.empid,employeetraining.TrainingName          
      FROM EmployeeTraining 
      InNER JOIN Employees ON EmployeeTraining.empid = employees.empid
      WHERE empid = '1'
      LEFT JOIN
      SELECT TrainingName,Position FROM requiredTraining
      ON EmployeeTraining.Training = RequiredTraining.Training
      WHERE (((EmployeeTraining.Training is Null)))

Edit: This question has been answered. Thanks everyone for the help. Your queries, although each was different, all accomplished the goal.

Answer 1

The query below is created from two MS Access queries with the SQL cut and pasted into derived tables. The two queries select the employee with their current training (#1) and the employee with their required training (#2). It is not updateable, but is easy to create. You can show only the missing training by adding a line at the end:

WHERE et.TrainingName Is Null

To select a single employee, you can add a line:

WHERE rt.EMPID=1 AND et.TrainingName Is Null

However, you mention a subform, so I expect you will wish to use link child and master fields to limit by employee.

SQL

SELECT rt.empid,
       rt.position,
       rt.trainingname,
       et.trainingname AS IsTrained
FROM   (SELECT employees.empid,
               requiredtraining.position,
               requiredtraining.trainingname
        FROM   employees
               INNER JOIN requiredtraining
                       ON employees.position = requiredtraining.position) AS rt
       LEFT JOIN (SELECT employees.empid,
                         employees.position,
                         employeetraining.trainingname
                  FROM   employees
                         INNER JOIN employeetraining
                                 ON employees.empid = employeetraining.empid) AS
                 et
              ON ( rt.trainingname = et.trainingname )
                 AND ( rt.position = et.position )
                 AND ( rt.empid = et.empid );