Question regarding 'not in' and subselects

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 13:57:37 -0400,
Vic Ricker <vicricker@charter.net> wrote:

Hi. I'm using PostgreSQL 7.4.2 under Fedora Core 1.

I have two tables with a single varchar(32) column in each. I'm trying
to find all the rows from one table that don't exist in the other
table. The query that I am using is:

select u.user_name from users u where u.user_name not in (select
user_name from iasusers);

(Actually, I'm doing something a bit more complex but this illustrates
the problem.)

It always seems to return 0 rows. As a test, I inserted a row into
users that I knew wasn't in iasuses but it didn't make a difference.

If I remove the 'not', the query returns the rows that exist in both
tables.

If I replace the subselect with a list, it seems to work the way that
I'd expect, i.e. "not in ('vic', 'joe')" it shows all the rows from
users except for vic and joe.

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Are there any nulls in iasusers.user_name?

On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 14:38, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 13:57:37 -0400,
Vic Ricker <vicricker@charter.net> wrote:

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Are there any nulls in iasusers.user_name?

There was a null in iasusers. I removed it and that fixed the problem.
I'm not sure that I understand why. It doesn't seem very intuitive...
:-)

Tom Innes's suggestion of:

select u.user_name from users u where u.user_name not in (select
user_name from iasusers ia where ia.user_name = u.user_name);

also worked.

Thanks guys!

--
Vic Ricker
http://www.ricker.us/