The doc says "The right-hand side is a parenthesized subquery, which must return exactly one column..." That's what you have if using "... where test_bit_id = all(select id from test_bits where id in (1,2,3,4));" The doc continues "...The left-hand expression is evaluated and compared to each row of the subquery result using the given operator, which must yield a Boolean result ..." So your where expression is equivalent to: where test_bit_id = (select id from test_bits where id = 1) AND test_bit_id = (select id from test_bits where id = 2) AND test_bit_id = (select id from test_bits where id = 3) AND test_bit_id = (select id from test_bits where id = 4); The doc continues "... The result of ALL is "true" if all rows yield true ..." Since test_bit_id can never be 1, 2, 3 and 4 at the same time the result of ALL will be false. So no records get returned.
>>> Julien Cigar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2007-11-14 15:50 >>> On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 11:56 +0000, Richard Huxton wrote: > Julien Cigar wrote: > > > > What I would like is a query that returns all the specimen_id of > > this table which have _all_ the given test_bit_id. > [snip] > > With the following I got a syntax error: > > select specimen_id > > from specimen_test_bits > > where test_bit_id = all(1,2,3,4); > > It's expecting an array here. You'd have to write > = all('{1,2,3,4}') > But that would have the same problem as... > > > The following works but no rows are returned : > > select specimen_id > > from specimen_test_bits > > where test_bit_id = all(select id from test_bits where id in (1,2,3,4)); > > It's testing each row individually and of course one row can't match ALL > four values. > > What you want to do is count the distinct values. Something like: > > SELECT > specimen_id > FROM foo > GROUP BY > specimen_id > HAVING > count(distinct test_bit_id) = 4 > ; > I don't think it would work, for example if I have: specimen_id | test_bit_id ------------+------------ 100 1 100 3 101 1 101 2 the test_bit_ids are parameters, so with the given test_bit_id 1,3 it would return specimen_id 101 too, which I don't want ... What I would like is the specimen_id which match _exactly_ the given test_bit_ids, so it should return only 100 in this example .. from the documentation ALL() can take a subquery too, not only an ARRAY (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/functions-subquery.html) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate