Search Postgresql Archives

Re: Secret Santa List

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Lou Duchez schrieb am 23.12.2015 um 04:49:
I have a company with four employees who participate in a Secret
Santa program, where each buys a gift for an employee chosen at
random.  (For now, I do not mind if an employee ends up buying a gift
for himself.) How can I make this work with an SQL statement?

Here is my Secret Santa table:

-- create table secretsanta (giver text, recipient text, primary key
(giver));

insert into secretsanta (giver) values ('Frank'), ('Joe'), ('Steve'),
('Earl'); --

Here is the SQL statement I am using to populate the "recipient"
column:

-- update secretsanta set recipient = ( select giver from secretsanta
s2 where not exists (select * from secretsanta s3 where s3.recipient
= s2.giver) order by random() limit 1 ); --

The problem: every time I run this, a single name is chosen at random
and used to populate all the rows.  So all four rows will get a
recipient of "Steve" or "Earl" or whatever single name is chosen at
random.

I suppose the problem is that the "exists" subquery does not
re-evaluate for each record.  How do I prevent this from happening?
Can I use a "lateral" join of some kind, or somehow tell PostgreSQL
to not be so optimized?


You can populate the table with a single statement:

with people (name) as (
  values ('Frank'), ('Joe'), ('Steve'), ('Earl')
)
insert into secretsanta (giver, recipient)
select distinct on (n1.name) n1.name, n2.name
from people n1
  join people n2 on n1.name <> n2.name
order by n1.name;





--
Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[Index of Archives]     [Postgresql Jobs]     [Postgresql Admin]     [Postgresql Performance]     [Linux Clusters]     [PHP Home]     [PHP on Windows]     [Kernel Newbies]     [PHP Classes]     [PHP Books]     [PHP Databases]     [Postgresql & PHP]     [Yosemite]
  Powered by Linux