Question

Scenario

I’m using SQL Server 2005
I have a T-Sql query that has multiple criteria to search on the WHERE clause.
I’m certain that I’m doing this in a very inefficient and long way round.
How can I ensure that I don’t have to manually type out all the criteria?
Instead I want to pass in the criteria via a SELECT * clause.

Current Query Code

SELECT * FROM tblBooks
WHERE BookID = 1
OR BookID = 4
OR BookID = 5
OR BookID = 7
OR BookID = 8
OR BookID = 11
OR BookID = 14

Proposed PSEUDO Query Code

SELECT * FROM tblBooks
WHERE BookID = (SELECT BookID FROM tblAuthors WHERE Genre = 'Fiction') 

Comments On Code

As you can see from the proposed pseudo code, the idea is to select a list of BookIDs from another query and pass this list of criteria into the actual query itself.
How do I go about doing this correctly?

Help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

are you looking for something like this

SELECT * FROM tblBooks
WHERE BookID in (SELECT BookID FROM tblAuthors WHERE Genre = 'Fiction') 

This will return all the data in the table tblAuthors if book id is there