Doing INTERSECT and MINUS in MySQL
Doing an INTERSECT An INTERSECT is simply an inner join where we compare the tuples of one table with those of the other, and select those that appear in both while weeding out duplicates. So SELECT member_id, name FROM a INTERSECT SELECT member_id, name FROM b can simply be rewritten to SELECT a.member_id, a.name FROM a INNER JOIN b USING (member_id, name) For more MySQL-related information om this site, see: MySQL Pop Quizzes || MySQL Function of the Day MySQL DATE_FORMAT() and PHP DATE() tool Other MySQL blog entries Performing a MINUS To transform the statement SELECT member_id, name FROM a MINUS SELECT member_id, name FROM b into something that MySQL can process, we can utilize subqueries (available from MySQL 4.1 onward). The easy-to-understand transformation is: SELECT DISTINCT member_id, name FROM a WHERE (member_id, name) NOT IN (SELECT member_id, name FROM table2); Of course, to any long-time MySQL user, this is immediately obvio