Is there a way to emulate the functionality of this without a subquery:
SELECT a, b, c
FROM tblFOO
WHERE tblFOO.id NOT IN
( SELECT id
FROM tblBAR)
If the operator was IN instead of NOT IN, the solution could easily be done with a SELECT DISTINCT and a JOIN. But, the NOT IN seems to be a completely different animal.
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The way to do this is to use an outer join. When matching rows in an outer join, the database will assign NULLs to all the columns from the table which did not have a matching row.
For example, consider
tblFOO tblBAR id a b c id d e 1 A B C 1 D E 2 P Q R 3 X Y Z 3 J K 4 L M N 4 S T 5 W X Y
When doing a left outer join of these tables on the id column, the database will insert NULL into all tblBAR columns for any rows of tblFOO which don't have a match -- including the id column. In the above example, this would be for the rows in the result set where tblFOO.id is 2 and 5. So the SQL you want that is equivalent to the NOT IN syntax is
SELECT tblFOO.a, tblFOO.b, tblFOO.c
FROM tblFOO LEFT OUTER JOIN tblBAR
ON tblFOO.id = tblBAR.id
WHERE tblBAR.id IS NULL
Notice that you are only SELECTing columns from tblFOO, while testing the id from tblBAR in the WHERE clause.
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This was first published in April 2002
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