Oracle SQL - select within a select (on the same table!)

Question

I'll try and explain what I'm trying to achieve quickly, since I have no idea how to explain it otherwise!

We have a table here that shows all employment history for all employees, I want the "Start_Date" of the current post ("Current_Flag" = 'Y'). As well as that, I want the "End_Date" of the post before that (was going to filter by current flag, sort by end date, and just grab the top one)

So anyway, here's my code:

SELECT "Gc_Staff_Number",
       "Start_Date",
       (SELECT "End_Date"
        FROM   "Employment_History"
        WHERE  "Current_Flag" != 'Y'
               AND ROWNUM = 1
               AND "Employee_Number" = "Employment_History"."Employee_Number"
        ORDER  BY "End_Date" ASC)
FROM   "Employment_History"
WHERE  "Current_Flag" = 'Y'

Any suggestions on how to get this working would be fantastic, hopefully the above makes a little bit of sense - to be honest the query at the moment won't even work which really sucks, hmm.

(edit: Oh! I'm writing this to query an existing system... which for some reason has all of the stupid double quotes around the table and field names, sigh!)

Answer 1

This is precisely the sort of scenario where analytics come to the rescue.

Given this test data:

SQL> select * from employment_history
  2  order by Gc_Staff_Number
  3             , start_date
  4  /

GC_STAFF_NUMBER START_DAT END_DATE  C
--------------- --------- --------- -
           1111 16-OCT-09           Y
           2222 08-MAR-08 26-MAY-09 N
           2222 12-DEC-09           Y
           3333 18-MAR-07 08-MAR-08 N
           3333 01-JUL-09 21-MAR-09 N
           3333 30-JUL-10           Y

6 rows selected.

SQL> 

An inline view with an analytic LAG() function provides the right answer:

SQL> select Gc_Staff_Number
  2             , start_date
  3             , prev_end_date
  4  from   (
  5      select Gc_Staff_Number
  6             , start_date
  7             , lag (end_date) over (partition by Gc_Staff_Number
  8                                    order by start_date )
  9                  as prev_end_date
 10             , current_flag
 11      from employment_history
 12  )
 13  where current_flag = 'Y'
 14  /

GC_STAFF_NUMBER START_DAT PREV_END_
--------------- --------- ---------
           1111 16-OCT-09
           2222 12-DEC-09 26-MAY-09
           3333 30-JUL-10 21-MAR-09

SQL>

The inline view is crucial to getting the right result. Otherwise the filter on CURRENT_FLAG removes the previous rows.

Answer 2

I'm a bit confused by the quotes, however, below should work for you:

SELECT "Gc_Staff_Number",
       "Start_Date", x.end_date
FROM   "Employment_History" eh,
(SELECT "End_Date"
        FROM   "Employment_History"
        WHERE  "Current_Flag" != 'Y'
               AND ROWNUM = 1
               AND "Employee_Number" = eh.Employee_Number
        ORDER  BY "End_Date" ASC) x
WHERE  "Current_Flag" = 'Y'