No one with any response on this? -- a. Anders Steinlein wrote:
What's the recommended way of storing "tags" in a database, and then filtering based on the existence, or *non*-existence, of those tags on some entities? Our application stores contacts, where each contact may have any number of tags. We do this with the tables contacts, contacts_tags and tags. We also have segments, which defines "filters" on contacts based on specific tags they must have and/or must *not* have. This is defined by the tables segments and segments_tags. (See bottom of post for table definitions). Finding contacts matching a given segment which has BOTH positive (required tags) and negative (non-existing tags) requirements is easy enough (simplified): SELECT segmentid, email FROM segments_tags st INNER JOIN contacts_tags ct USING (tagname) INNER JOIN contacts USING (email) WHERE st.tagtype = 1 GROUP BY 1, 2 HAVING COUNT(*) = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM segments_tags WHERE segmentid = st.segmentid AND tagtype = 1) EXCEPT SELECT segmentid, email FROM segments_tags st INNER JOIN contacts_tags ct USING (tagname) INNER JOIN contacts USING (email) WHERE st.tagtype = 0; However, segments which ONLY contain negative requirements (that's "tagtype" = 0) doesn't work, for obvious reasons. Is there a way to make this work with a single query for both cases? Possibly using CTE (which I'm not very familiar with)? Table definitions: Table "public.contacts" Column | Type | Modifiers ---------------+-----------------------------+----------------- email | email | not null name | text | status | character(1) | not null default 'a'::bpchar statuschanged | timestamp without time zone | Indexes: "contacts_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (email) Table "public.contacts_tags" Column | Type | Modifiers ---------+-------+----------- email | email | not null tagname | text | not null Indexes: "contacts_tags_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (email, tagname) "contacts_tags_tagname" btree (tagname) Foreign-key constraints: "contacts_tags_email_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (email) REFERENCES contacts(email) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE "contacts_tags_tagname_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (tagname) REFERENCES tags(tagname) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE Table "public.tags" Column | Type | Modifiers -----------+-----------------------------+----------------------- tagname | text | not null createdat | timestamp without time zone | not null default now() Indexes: "tags_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (tagname) Table "public.segments" Column | Type | Modifiers -------------+-----------------------------+--------------------- segmentid | integer | not null default nextval('segments_segmentid_seq'::regclass) segmentname| text | not null createdat | timestamp without time zone | not null default now() Indexes: "segments_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (segmentid) Table "public.segments_tags" Column | Type | Modifiers -----------+---------+---------- segmentid | integer | not null tagname | text | not null tagtype | integer | not null Indexes: "segments_tags_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (segmentid, tagname) Foreign-key constraints: "segments_tags_segmentid_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (segmentid) REFERENCES segments(segmentid) ON UPDATE RESTRICT ON DELETE CASCADE "segments_tags_tagname_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (tagname) REFERENCES tags(tagname) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE Regards, -- a.
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