the mother of all queries

[Technosailor]

I have this query for MS SQL that is supposed to query the master table of articles and insert the 'feature' article into a new table.[vbs]
INSERT INTO ltw_feature ( title, article, source, url, Author, bio, authorurl, authorurl2 )
SELECT TOP 1 ltw_articles.title, ltw_articles.content, ltw_articles.sourcename, ltw_articles.sourceURL, ltw_authors.aname, ltw_authors.bio, ltw_authors.authorURL, ltw_authors.authorURL2
FROM ltw_articles
INNER JOIN ltw_authors
ON ltw_articles.authorID = ltw_authors.authorref ORDER BY newid()[/vbs]

Now my problem is, is that I don't know how to make sure that the same article hasn't already been previously entered into the db. Any way to limit what gets selected to articles NOT already in the feature article table?

Thanks.
Sketch

[CrazyCrane]

You could add a sub query to your select statement, using EXISTS (or rather, NOT EXISTS) to check for the article.

How you determine whether two articles are the "same" is up to you to decide of course, but say for example that your criteria was the titles being the same. Then you'd modify your query to read:

INSERT INTO ltw_feature f1 ( title, article, source, url, Author, bio, authorurl, authorurl2 ) 
Select TOP 1 ltw_articles.title, ltw_articles.content, ltw_articles.sourcename, ltw_articles.sourceURL, ltw_authors.aname, ltw_authors.bio, ltw_authors.authorURL, ltw_authors.authorURL2 
FROM ltw_articles 
   INNER Join ltw_authors 
      On ltw_articles.authorID = ltw_authors.authorref 
   WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT title FROM ltw_feature f2 WHERE f2.title = ltw_articles.title)
ORDER BY newid()

So the query will now only get records where there isn't already a feature with the same title.

Hope that helps .