Question

So first of all, I manged to do something like this:

SELECT * FROM `trades`
WHERE 15003 NOT IN (`slot1`, `slot2`, `slot3`, `slot4`)

And this works correct, gives me rowes without product ‘15003’ in any of those columns.
But what if I don’t want to have any of ‘15003’ or ‘15004’ or ‘15008’ those in query?
I want to do it like this:

SELECT * FROM `trades`
WHERE 15003 NOT IN (`slot1`, `slot2`, `slot3`, `slot4`) AND
15004 NOT IN (`slot1`, `slot2`, `slot3`, `slot4`) AND
15008 NOT IN (`slot1`, `slot2`, `slot3`, `slot4`)

It works, but I think its not proper…

How can I optimize this?

Edit:
Each trade has its id and 4 slots.

Answer 1

This is a very poor design choice, exemplified by how much difficulty you’re having with this query. Instead of:

TABLE trades
  slot1 INT
  slot2 INT
  slot3 INT
  slot4 INT

should be properly normalized to something like:

TABLE trades
  trade_id INT

TABLE trades_slots
  trade_id INT
  slot_id INT

Which will allow you much more flexibility and make the queries MUCH easier to write.

SELECT *
FROM trades t INNER JOIN trades_slots s
  on t.trade_id = s.trade_id
WHERE s.slot_id NOT IN (15003, 15004, ...)