Re: problem with subqueries

Hi guys. Thanks for the rapid replies so far.

To answer some of the questions:

>you did not indicate an explicit join - or even a "from" clause for that
>matter- in the example of your create view statement.

My original post was a simplified version. Here is the actual view
creating statement:

create view monthord as select ord_date, extract (month from ord_date)
as month, extract (year from ord_date) as year,r_region,
number_of_items from orders,customer where ccode = codenum;

>But it appears to me that you are reinventing the wheel. Isn't this
>query the equivalent of a grouped aggregation

Yes - but again I was simplifying - I want to run a sub query for each
region, so I get output like this:

year month Reg1 Reg2 Reg3 Reg4
----- ----- ---- ---- ----- ----
1999 Jan 20 45 10 27
1999 Feb 30 43 18 37
...
2002 Oct 7 89 60 17

The subquery I have tried to run is actually this (there is probably a
way to do this all in SQL, but at present I would like to just
understand why my subqueries take so long).

-----start of script ---------------
#!/bin/sh
# prepare a query as shell variables

# set up timeframe
SDATE=`date --date '2 years ago' +'%Y-%m-01'`
EDATE=`date --date 'next month' +'%Y-%m-01'`

# use the QUERY env variable to build the full query
QUERY="select distinct year,month, "

for reg in `psql -U postgres -d product_db -c "select distinct r_code from regionlist order by r_code;"`
do

QUERY="$QUERY (select sum(monthcustomer.number_of_items) from monthcustomer where monthcustomer.year=m.year and monthcustomer.month=m.month and r_region like '$reg') as $reg,"

done

# now add a total column
QUERY="$QUERY (select sum(monthcustomer.number_of_items) from monthcustomer where ord_date >= '$SDATE' and ord_date < '$EDATE' and monthcustomer.year=m.year and monthcustomer.month=m.month) as TOTAL from monthcustomer m;"

# execute the query
psql -U postgres -d newmaggot -c "$QUERY"

-----end of script ---------------

As you can see, I get all the regions, and loop through them building
up a bunch of subqueries as I go along.

Hopefully this will answer some of your questions. I will try some of
the suggestions later on today (such as placing the distinct clause at
the end) but first I have to go and get some decorating done :-( (yes,
that sound you can hear is the crack of my wife's whip!).

Regards,
Pete

--
I do whatever the Voices tell me to do