SQL “select where not in subquery” returns no results

Update:

These articles in my blog describe the differences between the methods in more detail:

• NOT IN vs. NOT EXISTS vs. LEFT JOIN / IS NULL: SQL Server
• NOT IN vs. NOT EXISTS vs. LEFT JOIN / IS NULL: PostgreSQL
• NOT IN vs. NOT EXISTS vs. LEFT JOIN / IS NULL: Oracle
• NOT IN vs. NOT EXISTS vs. LEFT JOIN / IS NULL: MySQL

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There are three ways to do such a query:

• LEFT JOIN / IS NULL:SELECT * FROM common LEFT JOIN table1 t1 ON t1.common_id = common.common_id WHERE t1.common_id IS NULL
• NOT EXISTS:SELECT * FROM common WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT NULL FROM table1 t1 WHERE t1.common_id = common.common_id )
• NOT IN:SELECT * FROM common WHERE common_id NOT IN ( SELECT common_id FROM table1 t1 )

When table1.common_id is not nullable, all these queries are semantically the same.

When it is nullable, NOT IN is different, since IN (and, therefore, NOT IN) return NULL when a value does not match anything in a list containing a NULL.

This may be confusing but may become more obvious if we recall the alternate syntax for this:

common_id = ANY
(
SELECT  common_id
FROM    table1 t1
)

The result of this condition is a boolean product of all comparisons within the list. Of course, a single NULL value yields the NULL result which renders the whole result NULL too.

We never cannot say definitely that common_id is not equal to anything from this list, since at least one of the values is NULL.

Suppose we have these data:

common

--
1
3

table1

--
NULL
1
2

LEFT JOIN / IS NULL and NOT EXISTS will return 3, NOT IN will return nothing (since it will always evaluate to either FALSE or NULL).

In MySQL, in case on non-nullable column, LEFT JOIN / IS NULL and NOT IN are a little bit (several percent) more efficient than NOT EXISTS. If the column is nullable, NOT EXISTS is the most efficient (again, not much).

In Oracle, all three queries yield same plans (an ANTI JOIN).

In SQL Server, NOT IN / NOT EXISTS are more efficient, since LEFT JOIN / IS NULL cannot be optimized to an ANTI JOIN by its optimizer.

In PostgreSQL, LEFT JOIN / IS NULL and NOT EXISTS are more efficient than NOT IN, sine they are optimized to an Anti Join, while NOT IN uses hashed subplan (or even a plain subplan if the subquery is too large to hash)