Question

Take this table WORDS

WORD
Hello
Aardvark
Potato
Dog
Cat

And this list:

('Hello', 'Goodbye', 'Greetings', 'Dog')

How do I return a list of words that AREN’T in the words table, but are in my list?

If I have a table that “contains all possible words”, I can do:

SELECT * from ALL_WORDS_TABLE
where word in ('Hello', 'Goodbye', 'Greetings', 'Dog')
and word not in 
(SELECT word from WORDS
where word in ('Hello', 'Goodbye', 'Greetings', 'Dog')
);

However I do not have such a table. How else can this be done?

Also, constructing a new table is not an option because I do not have that level of access.

Answer 1

Instead of hard coding the list values into rows, use DBMS_DEBUG_VC2COLL to dynamically convert your delimited list into rows, then use the MINUS operator to eliminate rows in the second query that are not in the first query:

select column_value 
from table(sys.dbms_debug_vc2coll('Hello', 'Goodbye', 'Greetings', 'Dog'))
minus
select word
from words;