Many-to-many relation filter

Question

I need to filter my query with categories table which has many2many relation with another table. Is it possible to filter query with many2many relation?

Table

Answer 1

This is the test case you should have provided:

CREATE TABLE partner (
  partner_id serial PRIMARY KEY
, partner    text
);
INSERT INTO partner (partner) VALUES 
  ('partner1')
, ('partner2')
, ('partner3')
, ('partner4')
;    
CREATE TABLE category (
  category_id serial PRIMARY KEY
, category    text
);
INSERT INTO category (category) VALUES 
  ('categ1')
 ,('categ2')
 ,('business')
 ,('retail');

CREATE TABLE partner_category (
  partner_id  int REFERENCES partner(partner_id)
, category_id int REFERENCES category(category_id)
, CONSTRAINT cat_pk PRIMARY KEY (partner_id, category_id)
);
INSERT INTO partner_category (partner_id, category_id) VALUES 
   (1,1), (1,2), (1,3)
  ,(2,4)
  ,(3,3), (3,4)
  ,(4,1), (4,2);

And this is the query you are after (one of many possible variants):

SELECT p.*
FROM   partner p
WHERE  EXISTS (SELECT * FROM partner_category pc
               WHERE  pc.partner_id = p.partner_id AND pc.category_id = 3)
OR     EXISTS (SELECT * FROM partner_category pc
               WHERE  pc.partner_id = p.partner_id AND pc.category_id = 4)
ORDER  BY p.partner_id;

SQL Fiddle.

The key word here is relational division. We have assembled a whole arsenal of queries to deal with this class of problems under this related question:

• How to filter SQL results in a has-many-through relation