LNNVL

Interview Question:

Write a single SELECT statement that returns the number of employees who get no commission broken down by department. (Use scott.emp table)

Level:

Intermediate

Expected Result:

DEPTNO	NO_COMM_COUNT
10	3
20	5
30	3

Solutions

A very typical attempt to solve this problem results in the following query:

SELECT deptno, COUNT(*) no_comm_count
FROM scott.emp
WHERE comm IS NULL OR comm=0
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1

Yes, the result looks correct, but is the query correct?

The answer is NO! It would become apparent if we had a department where all employees get paid commission, so the number of those who does not would be 0.

Let’s change the requirement a bit – we will show all department and number of employees hired on Friday:

SELECT deptno, COUNT(*) fri_count
FROM scott.emp
WHERE TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY')='FRI'
GROUP BY deptno 
ORDER BY 1

The result of this query is clearly not what we want:

DEPTNO	FRI_COUNT
30	2

We would expect the following instead:

DEPTNO	FRI_COUNT
10	0
20	0
30	2

Why don’t we get the departments 10 and 20? The answer is very simple – because we filter “all” those department rows with our WHERE clause. So how should we work around?

Let’s start with more intuitive but less efficient approaches – we will use the same query as before and UNION it with another query that returns “empty” departments. Essentially, the original problem transforms into a new one – find all department where no employees were hired on Friday.

Strategy #1: Using UNION ALL with multi-column non-correlated subquery:

SELECT deptno, COUNT(*) fri_count 
FROM scott.emp 
WHERE TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY')='FRI' 
GROUP BY deptno
UNION ALL
SELECT deptno, 0 fri_count 
FROM scott.emp
WHERE (deptno, 'FRI') NOT IN (SELECT deptno, TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY')
                              FROM scott.emp)
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1

DEPTNO	FRI_COUNT
10	0
20	0
30	2

Strategy #2: Using UNION ALL with ALL predicate on correlated subquery:

SELECT deptno, COUNT(*) fri_count
FROM scott.emp
WHERE TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY')='FRI'
GROUP BY deptno
UNION ALL 
SELECT deptno, 0 no_comm_count 
FROM scott.emp a
WHERE 'FRI'!=ALL(SELECT TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY')
                 FROM scott.emp b
                 WHERE a.deptno=b.deptno) 
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1

It is apparent that the ALL predicate ensures that no employees were hired on Friday.

Now we will mimic the behavior of the UNION ALL operator using LEFT JOIN:

Strategy #3: Using LEFT JOIN:

SELECT a.deptno, COUNT(DISTINCT b.empno) fri_count
FROM scott.emp a LEFT JOIN scott.emp b ON a.deptno=b.deptno
                                      AND TO_CHAR(b.hiredate, 'DY')='FRI'
GROUP BY a.deptno
ORDER BY 1

COUNT(DISTINCT …) is needed to handle a Cartesian Product as the join by deptno column produces many to many relationship, i.e. Cartesian product.

Strategy #4: Generic substitution technique for an outer-join using UNION ALL

WITH e AS (
SELECT deptno, COUNT(*) fri_count
FROM scott.emp
WHERE TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY') = 'FRI'
GROUP BY deptno
UNION ALL
SELECT deptno, 0
FROM scott.emp
GROUP BY deptno
)
SELECT deptno, MAX(fri_count) fri_count
FROM e
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1

All the above techniques may look cool but they are clearly an overkill for such a simple problem. There is a simple rule worth remembering:

If you need to conditionally aggregate all records in the table but you fail doing so due to a WHERE clause filter, consider moving the filter into the GROUP function you use in SELECT.

Strategy #5: Conditional Aggregation

SELECT deptno, COUNT(DECODE(TO_CHAR(hiredate, 'DY'), 'FRI', 1)) fri_count
FROM scott.emp
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1

Alternatively, you can use CASE function inside of COUNT. It is especially convenient for our original question/problem, i.e. to count employees who is not paid a commission:

SELECT deptno, COUNT(CASE WHEN LNNVL(comm>0) THEN 1 END) no_comm_count
FROM scott.emp
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1

DEPTNO	NO_COMM_COUNT
10	3
20	5
30	3

This approach is the most efficient as it makes Oracle scanning the emp table only once.

Notice the use of the LNNVL function. You can read more about it in my recent post here.

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Suggested Reading:

Would you like to read about many more tricks and puzzles? For more tricks and cool techniques check my book “Oracle SQL Tricks and Workarounds”.

Recently, I came across LNNVL Oracle function and decided to assess its usability.

According to Oracle documentation, it “provides a concise way to evaluate a condition when one or both operands of the condition may be null.”

Let’s see a couple of problems this function can be applied to:

For each department count the number of employees who get no commission.

There are over 10 possible solutions that I am aware of, I will focus only on a couple where we can leverage LNNVL function.

Solution #1. Filter with LNNVL in WHERE clause:

SELECT deptno, COUNT(*) cnt 
FROM scott.emp 
WHERE LNNVL(comm>0)
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1;

Result:

DEPTNO        CNT
------ ----------
    10          3
    20          5
    30          3

In the above query, LNNVL(comm>0) filter is equivalent to: (comm<=0 OR comm IS NULL) and since comm cannot be negative, we can say that it is the same as NVL(comm,0)=0.

According to that same Oracle documentation, LNNVL “can be used only in the WHERE clause of a query.” This does not seem to be true, at least in 12g+ releases:

Solution #2. Using LNNVL in conditional aggregation:

SELECT deptno, SUM(CASE WHEN LNNVL(comm>0) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) cnt
FROM scott.emp 
GROUP BY deptno
ORDER BY 1;

LNNVL can also be used with IN operator. We will illustrate it with a solution (one of the many) to the following problem:

List all employees who is not a manager of somebody else.

SELECT empno, ename, deptno, job, mgr
FROM scott.emp
WHERE LNNVL(empno IN (SELECT mgr FROM scott.emp))
ORDER BY 1;

The following boolean expression defines a condition to see managers only:

empno IN (SELECT mgr FROM scott.emp)

We need the opposite one that handles NULLs – as mgr is a nullable column. And this is where LNNVL helps us.

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Oracle SQL Tricks, Tips, and Workarounds

Interview Question: For each department count the number of employees who get no commission.

Solutions

Tip of the day: use LNNVL function

Further Reading: