Oracle - Use of Between with letters - Between 'A' and 'C' - oracle11g

this doubt is very basic, however, after reading an answer for a given question I got fairly confused (I don't know why as it is a simple subject).
Consider this basic query:
SELECT * FROM emp WHERE ename BETWEEN ‘A’ AND ‘C’
The employees name returned will be those whose names start with A and B, and the explanation is as follows:
Here, a character column is compared against a string using the
BETWEEN operator, which is equivalent to ename >= ‘A’ AND ename <=
‘C’. The name CLARK will not be included in this query, because
‘CLARK’ is > ‘C’.
Why is Clark considered greater than 'C' if in the explanation we have the statement: ename is less than or equal to 'C' ?
Thank you.

Because when you alphabetically sort
Constant Clark C Claude
you'll get
C Clark Claude Constant
so
C < Clark < Claude < Constant
See Wikipedia for a more formal explanation, the essence is this (emphasis mine):
To decide which of two strings comes first in alphabetical order,
initially their first letters are compared. The string whose first
letter appears earlier in the alphabet comes first in alphabetical
order. If the first letters are the same, then the second letters are
compared, and so on, until the order is decided. (If one string runs
out of letters to compare, then it is deemed to come first; for
example, "cart" comes before "carthorse".) The result of arranging a
set of strings in alphabetical order is that words with the same first
letter are grouped together, and within such a group words with the
same first two letters are grouped together and so on.

Why is Clark considered greater than 'C' if in the explanation we have the statement: ename is less than or equal to 'C' ?
There is one thing to consider here.For obvious reasons we have ALLEN,BLAKE,CLARK,ADAMS,A,C.Sorting alphabetically we have
A
ADAMS
ALLEN
BLAKE
C
CLARK
That's why CLARK IS NOT PART OF THE RANGE BECAUSE IT COMES AFTER C.

Related

What's the best way to extract 2nd number from a string

I have something like below stored in a table column. I need only 133 extracted from this.
015.133.Governmental Affairs
When I do
select regexp_substr('015.133.Governmental Affairs', '\.*+[[:digit:]]+*',1,2) from dual;
The result is .133
If I do
regexp_substr('015.133.Governmental Affairs', '\*+[[:digit:]]+*',1,2)
it returns nothing. What's correct expression here?
The trick with coming up with a good regex is to be able to explain it in plain language first.
Editing to explain better hopefully.
Here I am matching zero or more digits where followed by a literal period. The 4th argument to REGEXP_SUBSTR (2) is which occurrence of this pattern to match on. Note the pattern consists of 2 groups as defined by being surrounded by parentheses. The 6th argument to REGEXP_SUBSTR says when a match is found to return the 1st subgroup (the numbers, not the period), if you put a 2 there you'd get the period that follows the number 133.
SELECT REGEXP_SUBSTR('015.133.Governmental Affairs', '([[:digit:]]*?)(\.)', 1, 2, NULL, 1) AS nbr
FROM dual;
NBR
---
133
1 row selected.
Here's something adapted from this question: How to extract group from regular expression in Oracle?
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(
'015.133.Governmental Affairs',
'^[[:digit:]]+\.([[:digit:]]+)\..*',
'\1'
) FROM DUAL;
The regex looks for a string that starts with a series of digits, then ., then more digits, then another ., then the rest of the string. It then replaces the entire match (which is the entire string) with \1, which is whatever was in that second set of digits, inside the parentheses.

Assign integral value to list of relative values

I have an assortment of syrups, each of which has a value - the amount of sugar per volume. As people blend these syrups, I track which ones are used, and created a table to get a Relative Weight of each blend. I understand > Data > Sort > Options > Custom Sort Order.
However, I really don't wish to sort each table, and am looking for a way to parse a column of this list as entered, and return a column with results in an Integral Relative Value of each row, as compared to the weights of syrups in the other rows of the table.
Unique Name weight Not Unique Relative Value
blueberry .250 2
raspberry .333 3
orange .425 4
tangerine .333 3
blackberry .225 1
I am attempting to find the "Relative Sort", a nested function which can assign an integral value of the Unique Name which compares the weights of the syrups. A "Lookup" only works if there is an absolute equality, right?
What if someone doesn't use "blackberry syrup", then "blueberry" is the lightest, and should be labeled as 1.
Is this too complicated for LibreOffice Calc?
It's a recursive greater than/less than/equal to comparison?
IF the problem is calculating the right hand column below from entries that may be sorted ascending by value as on the left:
then an answer is, in C2 and copied down to suit (provided C1 is blank or 0):
=IF(B1<>B2,C1+1,C1)
Without sorting the RANK function might be simpler and adequate (though in the example returning 5 rather than 4).

Efficient string similarity grouping

Setting:
I have data on people, and their parent's names, and I want to find siblings (people with identical parent names).
pdata<-data.frame(parents_name=c("peter pan + marta steward",
"pieter pan + marta steward",
"armin dolgner + jane johanna dough",
"jack jackson + sombody else"))
The expected output here would be a column indicating that the first two observations belong to family X, while the third and fourth columns are each in a separate family. E.g:
person_id parents_name family_id
1 "peter pan + marta steward", 1
2 "pieter pan + marta steward", 1
3 "armin dolgner + jane johanna dough", 2
4 "jack jackson + sombody else" 3
Current approach:
I am flexible regarding the distance metric. Currently, I use Levenshtein edit-distance to match obs, allowing for two-character differences. But other variants such as "largest common sub string" would be fine if they run faster.
For smaller subsamples I use stringdist::stringdist in a loop or stringdist::stringdistmatrix, but this is getting increasingly inefficient as sample size increases.
The matrix version explodes once a certain sample size is used. My terribly inefficient attempt at looping is here:
#create data of the same complexity using random last-names
#(4mio obs and ~1-3 kids per parents)
pdata<-data.frame(parents_name=paste0(rep(c("peter pan + marta ",
"pieter pan + marta ",
"armin dolgner + jane johanna ",
"jack jackson + sombody "),1e6),stringi::stri_rand_strings(4e6, 5)))
for (i in 1:nrow(pdata)) {
similar_fatersname0<-stringdist::stringdist(pdata$parents_name[i],pdata$parents_name[i:nrow(pdata)],nthread=4)<2
#[create grouping indicator]
}
My question: There should be substantial efficiency gains, e.g. because I could stop comparing strings once I found them to sufficiently different in something that is easier to assess, eg. string length, or first word. The string length variant already works and reduces complexity by a factor ~3. But thats by far too little. Any suggestions to reduce computation time are appreciated.
Remarks:
The strings are actually in unicode and not in the Latin alphabet (Devnagari)
Pre-processing to drop unused characters etc is done
There are two challenges:
A. The parallel execution of Levenstein distance - instead of a sequential loop
B. The number of comparisons: if our source list has 4 million entries, theoretically we should run 16 trillion of Levenstein distance measures, which is unrealistic, even if we resolve the first challenge.
To make my use of language clear, here are our definitions
we want to measure the Levenstein distance between expressions.
every expression has two sections, the parent A full name and the parent B full name which are separated by a plus sign
the order of the sections matters (i.e. two expressions (1, 2) are identical if Parent A of expression 1 = Parent A of expression 2 and Parent B or expression 1= Parent B of expression 2. Expressions will not be considered identical if Parent A of expression 1 = Parent B of expression 2 and Parent B of expression 1 = Parent A of expression 2)
a section (or a full name) is a series of words, which are separated by spaces or dashes and correspond to the the first name and last name of a person
we assume the maximum number of words in a section is 6 (your example has sections of 2 or 3 words, I assume we can have up to 6)
the sequence of words in a section matters (the section is always a first name followed by a last name and never the last name first, e.g. Jack John and John Jack are two different persons).
there are 4 million expressions
expressions are assumed to contain only English characters. Numbers, spaces, punctuation, dashes, and any non-English character can be ignored
we assume the easy matches are already done (like the exact expression matches) and we do not have to search for exact matches
Technically the goal is to find series of matching expressions in the 4-million expressions list. Two expressions are considered matching expression if their Levenstein distance is less than 2.
Practically we create two lists, which are exact copies of the initial 4-million expressions list. We call then the Left list and the Right list. Each expression is assigned an expression id before duplicating the list.
Our goal is to find entries in the Right list which have a Levenstein distance of less than 2 to entries of the Left list, excluding the same entry (same expression id).
I suggest a two step approach to resolve the two challenges separately. The first step will reduce the list of the possible matching expressions, the second will simplify the Levenstein distance measurement since we only look at very close expressions. The technology used is any traditional database server because we need to index the data sets for performance.
CHALLENGE A
The challenge A consists of reducing the number of distance measurements. We start from a maximum of approx. 16 trillion (4 million to the power of two) and we should not exceed a few tens or hundreds of millions.
The technique to use here consists of searching for at least one similar word in the complete expression. Depending on how the data is distributed, this will dramatically reduce the number of possible matching pairs. Alternatively, depending on the required accuracy of the result, we can also search for pairs with at least two similar words, or with at least half of similar words.
Technically I suggest to put the expression list in a table. Add an identity column to create a unique id per expression, and create 12 character columns. Then parse the expressions and put each word of each section in a separate column. This will look like (I have not represented all the 12 columns, but the idea is below):
|id | expression | sect_a_w_1 | sect_a_w_2 | sect_b_w_1 |sect_b_w_2 |
|1 | peter pan + marta steward | peter | pan | marta |steward |
There are empty columns (since there are very few expressions with 12 words) but it does not matter.
Then we replicate the table and create an index on every sect... column.
We run 12 joins which try to find similar words, something like
SELECT L.id, R.id
FROM left table L JOIN right table T
ON L.sect_a_w_1 = R.sect_a_w_1
AND L.id <> R.id
We collect the output in 12 temp tables and run an union query of the 12 tables to get a short list of all expressions which have a potential matching expressions with at least one identical word. This is the solution to our challenge A. We now have a short list of the most likely matching pairs. This list will contain millions of records (pairs of Left and Right entries), but not billions.
CHALLENGE B
The goal of challenge B is to process a simplified Levenstein distance in batch (instead of running it in a loop).
First we should agree on what is a simplified Levenstein distance.
First we agree that the levenstein distance of two expressions is the sum of the levenstein distance of all the words of the two expressions which have the same index. I mean the Levenstein distance of two expressions is the distance of their two first words, plus the distance of their two second words, etc.
Secondly, we need to invent a simplified Levenstein distance. I suggest to use the n-gram approach with only grams of 2 characters which have an index absolute difference of less than 2 .
e.g. the distance between peter and pieter is calculated as below
Peter
1 = pe
2 = et
3 = te
4 = er
5 = r_
Pieter
1 = pi
2 = ie
3 = et
4 = te
5 = er
6 = r_
Peter and Pieter have 4 common 2-grams with an index absolute difference of less than 2 'et','te','er','r_'. There are 6 possible 2-grams in the largest of the two words, the distance is then 6-4 = 2 - The Levenstein distance would also be 2 because there's one move of 'eter' and one letter insertion 'i'.
This is an approximation which will not work in all cases, but I think in our situation it will work very well. If we're not satisfied with the quality of the results we can try with 3-grams or 4-grams or allow a larger than 2 gram sequence difference. But the idea is to execute much fewer calculations per pair than in the traditional Levenstein algorithm.
Then we need to convert this into a technical solution. What I have done before is the following:
First isolate the words: since we need only to measure the distance between words, and then sum these distances per expression, we can further reduce the number of calculations by running a distinct select on the list of words (we have already prepared the list of words in the previous section).
This approach requires a mapping table which keeps track of the expression id, the section id, the word id and the word sequence number for word, so that the original expression distance can be calculated at the end of the process.
We then have a new list which is much shorter, and contains a cross join of all words for which the 2-gram distance measure is relevant.
Then we want to batch process this 2-gram distance measurement, and I suggest to do it in a SQL join. This requires a pre-processing step which consists of creating a new temporary table which stores every 2-gram in a separate row – and keeps track of the word Id, the word sequence and the section type
Technically this is done by slicing the list of words using a series (or a loop) of substring select, like this (assuming the word list tables - there are two copies, one Left and one Right - contain 2 columns word_id and word) :
INSERT INTO left_gram_table (word_id, gram_seq, gram)
SELECT word_id, 1 AS gram_seq, SUBSTRING(word,1,2) AS gram
FROM left_word_table
And then
INSERT INTO left_gram_table (word_id, gram_seq, gram)
SELECT word_id, 2 AS gram_seq, SUBSTRING(word,2,2) AS gram
FROM left_word_table
Etc.
Something which will make “steward” look like this (assume the word id is 152)
| pk | word_id | gram_seq | gram |
| 1 | 152 | 1 | st |
| 2 | 152 | 2 | te |
| 3 | 152 | 3 | ew |
| 4 | 152 | 4 | wa |
| 5 | 152 | 5 | ar |
| 6 | 152 | 6 | rd |
| 7 | 152 | 7 | d_ |
Don't forget to create an index on the word_id, the gram and the gram_seq columns, and the distance can be calculated with a join of the left and the right gram list, where the ON looks like
ON L.gram = R.gram
AND ABS(L.gram_seq + R.gram_seq)< 2
AND L.word_id <> R.word_id
The distance is the length of the longest of the two words minus the number of the matching grams. SQL is extremely fast to make such a query, and I think a simple computer with 8 gigs of RAM would easily do several hundred of million lines in a reasonable time frame.
And then it's only a matter of joining the mapping table to calculate the sum of word to word distance in every expression, to get the total expression to expression distance.
You are using the stringdist package anyway, does stringdist::phonetic() suit your needs? It computes the soundex code for each string, eg:
phonetic(pdata$parents_name)
[1] "P361" "P361" "A655" "J225"
Soundex is a tried-and-true method (almost 100 years old) for hashing names, and that means you don't need to compare every single pair of observations.
You might want to go further and do soundex on first name and last name seperately for father and mother.
My suggestion is to use a data science approach to identify only similar (same cluster) names to compare using stringdist.
I have modified a little bit the code generating "parents_name" adding more variability in first and second names in a scenario close to reality.
num<-4e6
#Random length
random_l<-round(runif(num,min = 5, max=15),0)
#Random strings in the first and second name
parent_rand_first<-stringi::stri_rand_strings(num, random_l)
order<-sample(1:num, num, replace=F)
parent_rand_second<-parent_rand_first[order]
#Paste first and second name
parents_name<-paste(parent_rand_first," + ",parent_rand_second)
parents_name[1:10]
Here start the real analysis, first extract feature from the names such as global length, length of the first, length of the second one, numeber of vowels and consonansts in both first and second name (and any other of interest).
After that bind all these feature and clusterize the data.frame in a high number of clusters (eg. 1000)
features<-cbind(nchars,nchars_first,nchars_second,nvowels_first,nvowels_second,nconsonants_first,nconsonants_second)
n_clusters<-1000
clusters<-kmeans(features,centers = n_clusters)
Apply stringdistmatrix only inside each cluster (containing similar couple of names)
dist_matrix<-NULL
for(i in 1:n_clusters)
{
cluster_i<-clusters$cluster==i
parents_name<-as.character(parents_name[cluster_i])
dist_matrix[[i]]<-stringdistmatrix(parents_name,parents_name,"lv")
}
In dist_matrix you have the distance beetwen each element in the cluster and you are able to assign the family_id using this distance.
To compute the distance in each cluster (in this example) the code takes approximately 1 sec (depending on the dimension of the cluster), in 15mins all the distances are computed.
WARNING: dist_matrix grow very fast, in your code is better if you will analyze it inside di for loop extracting famyli_id and then you can discard it.
You may improve by not comparing all the couples of lines.
Instead, create a new variable that will be helpfull for decide if it is worth comparing.
For exemple, create a new variable "score" contaning the ordered list of letters used in parents_name (for exemple if "peter pan + marta steward" then the score will be "ademnprstw"), and calculate distance only between lines where score are matching.
Of course, you can find a score that fits better your need, and improve a little to enable comparison when not all the letters used are common ..
I faced the same performance issue couple years ago. I had to match people's duplicates based on their typed names. My dataset had 200k names and the matrix approach exploded. After searching for some day about a better method, the method I'm proposing here did the job for me in some minutes:
library(stringdist)
parents_name <- c("peter pan + marta steward",
"pieter pan + marta steward",
"armin dolgner + jane johanna dough",
"jack jackson + sombody else")
person_id <- 1:length(parents_name)
family_id <- vector("integer", length(parents_name))
#Looping through unassigned family ids
while(sum(family_id == 0) > 0){
ids <- person_id[family_id == 0]
dists <- stringdist(parents_name[family_id == 0][1],
parents_name[family_id == 0],
method = "lv")
matches <- ids[dists <= 3]
family_id[matches] <- max(family_id) + 1
}
result <- data.frame(person_id, parents_name, family_id)
That way the while will compare fewer matches on every iteration. From that, you might implement different performance boosters, like filtering the names with the same first letter before comparing, etc.
Making equivalency groups on non transitive relation does not make sense. If A is like B and B is like C, but A is not like C, how would you make families from that? Using something like soundex (that was idea of Neal Fultz, not mine) seems the only meaningful option and it solves your problem with performance too.
What I have used to reduce the permutations involved in this sort of name matching, is create a function that counts the syllables in the name (surname) involved. Then store this in the database, as a pre-processed value. This becomes a Syllable Hash function.
Then you can choose to group words together with the same number of syllables as each other. (Although I use algorithms that allow 1 or 2 syllables difference, which may be presented as legitimate spelling / typo errors...But my research has found that 95% of misspellings share the same number of syllables)
In this case Peter and Pieter would have the same syllable count (2), but Jones and Smith do not (they have 1). (For example)
If your function does not get 1 syllable for Jones, then you may need to increase your tolerance to allow for at least 1 syllable difference in the Syllable Hash function grouping that you use. (To account for incorrect syllable function results, and to catch the matching surname correctly in the grouping)
My syllable counting function may not apply completely - as you might need to cope with non-English letter sets...(So I have not pasted the code...Its in C anyway) Mind you - the Syllable count function does not have to be accurate in terms of TRUE syllable count; it simply needs to act as a reliable Hashing function - which it does. Far superior to SoundEx which relies on the first letter being accurate.
Give it a go, you might be surprised how much improvement you get by implementing a Syllable Hash function. You may have to ask SO for help getting the function into your language.
If I get it right, you want to compare every parent pair (every row in parent_name data frame) with all other pairs (rows), and keep rows that have Levenstein distance smaller or equal to 2.
I have written following code for the beginning:
pdata<-data.frame(parents_name=c("peter pan + marta steward",
"pieter pan + marta steward",
"armin dolgner + jane johanna dough",
"jack jackson + sombody else"))
fuzzy_match <- list()
system.time(for (i in 1:nrow(pdata)){
fuzzy_match[[i]] <- cbind(pdata, parents_name_2 = pdata[i,"parents_name"],
dist = as.integer(stringdist(pdata[i,"parents_name"], pdata$parents_name)))
fuzzy_match[[i]] <- fuzzy_match[[i]][fuzzy_match[[i]]$dist <= 2,]
})
fuzzy_final <- do.call(rbind, fuzzy_match)
Does it return what you wanted?
it reproduces your output, i guess you will have to decide partial matching criteria, i kept the default agrep ones
pdata$parents_name<-as.character(pdata$parents_name)
x00<-unique(lapply(pdata$parents_name,function(x) agrep(x,pdata$parents_name)))
x=c()
for (i in 1:length(x00)){
x=c(x,rep(i,length(x00[[i]])))
}
pdata$person_id=seq(1:nrow(pdata))
pdata$family_id=x

How to get the total quantity of results using count(*)?

i need to get the total quantity of results for each person but i get ...
resultado
MY QUERY..
select t.fecha_hora_timbre,e.nombre,e.apellido,d.descripcion as departamento_trabaja, t.fecha,count(*)
from fulltime.timbre t, fulltime.empleado e, fulltime.departamento d
where d.depa_id=e.depa_id and t.codigo_empleado=e.codigo_empleado and
trunc(t.fecha) between trunc(to_date('15/02/2017','dd/mm/yyyy')) and trunc(to_date('14/03/2017','dd/mm/yyyy'))
group by t.fecha_hora_timbre,e.nombre,e.apellido,d.descripcion, t.fecha
Expected data...
NOMBRE | APELLIDO | DEPARTAMENTO_TRABAJA | VECES_MARCADAS(count)
MARIA TARCILA IGLESIAS BECERRA ALCALDIA 4
KATHERINE TATIANA SEGOVIA FERNANDEZ ALCALDIA 10
FREDDY AGUSTIN VALDIVIESO VALLEJO ALCALDIA 3
UPDATE..
select e.nombre,e.apellido,d.descripcion as departamento_trabaja,COUNT(*)
from fulltime.timbre t, fulltime.empleado e, fulltime.departamento d
where d.depa_id=e.depa_id and t.codigo_empleado=e.codigo_empleado and
trunc(t.fecha) between trunc(to_date('15/02/2017','dd/mm/yyyy')) and trunc(to_date('14/03/2017','dd/mm/yyyy'))
group by t.fecha_hora_timbre,e.nombre,e.apellido,d.descripcion, t.fecha
You should only select and group by the non-aggregate columns you actually want to count against. At the moment you're including the fecha_hora_timbre and fechacolumns in each row, so you're counting the unique combinations of those columns as well as the name/department information you actually want to count.
select e.nombre, e.apellido, d.descripcion as departamento_trabaja,
count(*) a veces_marcadas
from fulltime.timbre t
join fulltime.empleado e on t.codigo_empleado=e.codigo_empleado
join fulltime.departamento d on d.depa_id=e.depa_id
where t.fecha >= to_date('15/02/2017','dd/mm/yyyy')
and t.fecha < to_date('15/03/2017','dd/mm/yyyy')
group by e.nombre, e.apellido, d.descripcion
I've removed the extra columns. Notice that they have gone from both the select list and the group-by clause. If you have a non-aggregate column in the select list that isn't in the group-by you'll get an ORA-00937 error; but if you have a column in the group-by that isn't in the select list then it will still group by that even though you can't see it and you just won't get the results you expect.
I've also changed from old-style join syntax to modern syntax. And I've changed the date comparison; firstly because doing trunc() as part of trunc(to_date('15/02/2017','dd/mm/yyyy')) is pointless - you already know the time part is midnight, so the trunc doesn't achieve anything. But mostly so that if there is an index on fecha that index can be used. If you do trunc(f.techa) then the value of every column value has to be truncated, which stops the index being used (unless you have a function-based index). As between in inclusive, using >= and < with one day later on the higher limit should have the same effect overall.

Fetch first character of each word in sqlite3 string

In sqlite3 table we have names like as below.
Monty Python
Luther Blissett
Rey maR EsteBaN
Monty Cantsin
Geoffrey Cohen
Karen Eliot
Poor Konrad
I need a query to fetch the character from the database.
Initially I need a query that should fetch first letter of every word in a string. In above example it should display M, P, L, B, R, E, C, G, K
Suppose if a user selects C after the above query, then it should fetch next possible characters of Cantsin and Cohen i.e A and O.
Please provide any inputs on how the solution can be arrived?
Solution below would work if only first name is taken to count.
Consider data:
sqlite> SELECT name FROM COMPANY;
Paul Allen
Mark
Monty Python
Luther Blissett
Monty Cantsin
For 1st query:
sqlite> SELECT distinct substr(name,1,1) FROM COMPANY;
P
M
L
And later for 2nd output try below algorithm:
if you have 1 character input then use substr (name, 2,1)
if you have 2 characters input then use substr (name, 3,1)
.. generally : if x is number of characters input and y is number of character output expected, try substr (name, x+1, y)
sqlite> SELECT distinct substr(name,2,1) FROM COMPANY where name like 'M%';
a
o
sqlite> SELECT distinct substr(name,3,1) FROM COMPANY where name like 'Ma%';
r
If others words also need to be considered for search, replace table name with sub queries as below.
SELECT distinct substr(name,2,1) FROM
(
select name from company where name like 'A%' -- counts for first word
UNION
select name from company where name like '% A%' -- counts for words that start with space
);
Please note that above queries will only return the characters of first word, though the match is for all words it would consider first name as source to fetch characters.

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