Using MAX() in a SQL Subquery

One pro bono project I’m working on is improving a school website where parents can sign up for classes, view students’ grades, etc. One of the problems with the website was that the list of user accounts, which includes all parents and teachers, includes parents from previous years who no longer have students there.

The query for pulling this information was very simple:

SELECT * FROM UserAccounts ORDER BY lastName ASC

This query pulled all users and ordered them only by last name. The data was being dumped into an ASP.NET GridView with column sorting, and there were only a couple hundred people there, so it wasn’t completely unmanageable. However, dealing with all the parents who no longer have kids there did make visual searches more difficult. The request was to bring all current parents to the top of the list so that other admins don’t have to search through pages of people who no longer attend.

A quick fix for this would be to sort the list based on last academic year attended. We’ll do this by employing the MAX() function.

In addition to the UserAccounts table, there are other tables called “students” (which includes all current and past students) and “schedule” (which holds student schedules). In the schedule table, a column called “s_year” that holds the academic year (in the format of “2017-18”). We can join these tables based on user account IDs in the UserAccount table, the parentID column in the students table, and the student id (s_id) column in the schedule table.

One more thing: Since this list also includes people who have never had students there, the revised query will have to take that into account.

database diagram showing table relationships

The below query will not only solve this problem, but will also sort by first and last name. Users with no academic year (a NULL value) will be at the bottom of the list.

SELECT DISTINCT ua.*, sc.s_year FROM UserAccounts ua
LEFT OUTER JOIN students s ON s.parentID = ua.ID
LEFT OUTER JOIN schedule sc ON sc.s_id = s.ID
WHERE sc.s_year IS NULL
OR sc.s_year = (
   SELECT MAX(sc2.s_year) FROM schedule sc2 WHERE sc2.s_id = s.ID
)
ORDER BY sc.s_year DESC, ua.lastName, ua.firstName

The only remaining thing to do is to add the year column to the GridView and make sure that sorting is enabled.

Leave a Reply