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Sub queries are not well optimised till very recently therefore rewrite subquery as a join for speed. eg for A not in B the following SELECT a.* FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON a.id = b.id WHERE b.id IS NULL; also if you have two sets from the same table use derived tables and then join them (SELECT distinct institution FROM `renewals` WHERE snap_date < '2011-07-01') as b (SELECT distinct institution from renewals) as a Dave Caroline On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 5:41 PM, Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I've not done much with MySQL subqueries, and I'm trying right now with what I find to be surprising results. I wonder if someone can help me understand. > > I have a pile of data that with columns for "institution" and "date". Institution gets repeated a lot, with many different dates. I want to select all the institutions that *only* have dates after July 1 and don't appear in the table before that. My solution was to do a first query for all the institutions that DO have dates before July 1 > SELECT distinct institution FROM `renewals` WHERE snap_date < '2011-07-01' > > And then to do a SELECT query on all the institutions: > SELECT distinct institution from renewals > > And then try to do a NOT IN subquery subtracting the smaller query from the larger one: > > SELECT distinct institution from renewals > WHERE institution not in > (SELECT distinct institution FROM `renewals` WHERE snap_date < '2011-07-01') > > ...only it doesn't seem to work. Or rather, the query has been running for several minutes and never comes back with an answer. Each of these two queries takes just a few milliseconds to run on its own. > > Can someone tell me (a) am I just formatting the query wrong, (b) do subqueries like this just take forever, and/or (c) is there a better way to do this? (I don't really understand about JOIN queries, but from what I can tell they are only for mixing the results of two different tables so I think they might not apply here.) > > Any advice would be most welcome. > > Thanks > Ken >