report the names of all sellers who did not make any sales in 2020

Question

Customer table:

customer_id	customer_name
101	Alice
102	Bob
103	Charlie

Orders table:

order_id	sale_date	order_cost	customer_id	seller_id
1	2020-03-01	1500	101	1
2	2020-05-25	2400	102	2
3	2019-05-25	800	101	3
4	2020-09-13	1000	103	2
5	2019-02-11	700	101	2

Seller table:

seller_id	seller_name
1	Daniel
2	Elizabeth
3	Frank

Write an SQL query to report the names of all sellers who did not make any sales in 2020

This question was asked to me in a data analyst interview and I provided the query below. But my query is partially incorrect because it also gives those sellers who made sales in another year along with 2020 like Elizabeth because she made sales in 2019 and 2020. So I want a query in SQL which only gives the name of all sellers who made sales in 2020 only.

select s.seller_name
from seller_table s
JOIN order_table o
ON s.seller_id = o.seller_id
where year(sale_date) <> 2020;

Answer 1

Your query selects all sellers that have an order in a year that is not 2020. This is not what you want.

You want to select sellers for which not exists an order in year 2020.

select s.seller_name
from seller_table s
where not exists
(
  select null
  from order_table o
  where o.seller_id = s.seller_id
  and year(o.sale_date) = 2020
);

There are other ways to achieve the same, but this is the most straight-forward.

Answer 2

Two equivalent approaches:

select s.seller_name
from seller_table s
where not exists (select 1 from order_table where o.seller_id=s.seller_id and year(sale_date)=2020)

and

select s.seller_name
from seller_table s
left join order_table o on o.seller_id=s.seller_id and year(o.sale_date)=2020
where o.seller_id is null

The former expresses the intent of the query better; the latter better represents how the query will actually be executed.

Answer 3

switch to a not in or not exists.

  select seller_name from seller where id not in 
    (select seller_id from order_table where year(sale_date) = 2020)