Keith Devens .com - Weblog: MySQL is damaging my brain

Thursday, February 26, 2004

MySQL is damaging my brain

Ack! MySQL is damaging my brain. Because it doesn't have subqueries, I have to think of all these unnatural ways to do queries to get what I want. And because I can't do subqueries, my brain is starting to not go there anymore. Working with MySQL is actually hurting my database skills. Suck.

For instance, right now I can't do a WHERE NOT EXISTS() predicate, and very frequently I find myself having to make lists of all possible Foo_Ids and do a query like "SELECT * FROM Foo WHERE Foo_Ids IN(".join(',',$ids).")" based on that. Evil.

A common solution to some things is to do a LEFT JOIN and select out the ones where one of the fields from the right table is NULL, but that's not always applicable.

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 4731

03:21 (utc-5)
edited: 03:27 (utc-5)

Comments

If you are really missing subqueries, you should upgrade to the latest version of MySQL:

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Subqueries.html

Hope this helps

∴ Richard Allsebrook | 26-Feb-2004 10:45am est | http://richardathome.no-ip.com | #4004

I know, and I've been waiting for it for a long time. I don't have control over the machine I host on (I'm on a shared host), otherwise I probably would run 4.1. My host will probably upgrade shortly after it's released as stable - they're usually good about that stuff.

∴ Keith | 26-Feb-2004 1:31pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #4005

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