SQL: Syntax error with intersect?

Nick Heiner picture Nick Heiner · Feb 20, 2010 · Viewed 23.2k times · Source

This is my query:

-- Sids of suppliers who supply a green part AND a red part
(SELECT Suppliers.sid
FROM Suppliers
JOIN Catalog ON Catalog.sid = Suppliers.sid
JOIN Parts ON Parts.pid = Catalog.pid
WHERE Parts.color = "red")
INTERSECT
(SELECT Suppliers.sid
FROM Suppliers
JOIN Catalog ON Catalog.sid = Suppliers.sid
JOIN Parts ON Parts.pid = Catalog.pid
WHERE Parts.color = "green");

This is the error:

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near "INTERSECT (SELECT Suppliers.sid FROM Suppliers JOIN Catalog ON Catalog.sid = Sup" on line 6.

What am I doing wrong?

This is the schema:

Suppliers(sid: integer, sname: string, address string)

Parts(pid: integer, pname: string, color: string)

Catalog(sid: integer, pid: integer, cost: real)

bold = primary key

Answer

Roland Bouman picture Roland Bouman · Feb 20, 2010

MySQL, which you appear to be using, does not support the INTERSECT syntax. You're going to have to solve it another way.

In this case, it is trivial -we only need a list of all suppliers that offer "green" and "red" of some part- your query does not bother to see if the parts themselves are related, so we can solve it quite easily like this:

SELECT Suppliers.sid
FROM Suppliers
JOIN Catalog ON Catalog.sid = Suppliers.sid
JOIN Parts ON Parts.pid = Catalog.pid
WHERE Parts.color IN ('red', 'green')
GROUP BY Suppliers.sid
HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT Parts.color) = 2

Personally, I don't believe the original query is a typical INTERSECT problem. Take a look at the JOIN solution offered by Vinko Vrsalovic for a general solution to emulate the INTERSECT (which I would btw prefer even if the RDBMS would in fact offer INTERSECT natively).