Question

Ok I have a table people and I have and Id column with thousands of record… I have another list of comma seperated Ids like this

1, 2, 457, 558, 998

I want to check this people table to see which of the 5 records is not present…

I tried

select id from people where id not in (1, 2, 457, 558, 998)

but this returns all the other thousand records and not just the records not found in these 5

any ideas what i am missing

Answer 1

select a.id
from (
    select 1 as id
    union all
    select 2
    union all
    select 457
    union all
    select 558
    union all
    select 998
) a 
left outer join people p on a.id = p.id
where p.id is null

If the values you want to check against are in a table, you can do this:

select c.id
from MyCheckValues c
left outer join people p on c.id = p.id
where p.id is null