There are at least a few possible reasons you might be getting the dreaded error 1064 (42000) that reads “You have an error in your SQL syntax…” etc when trying to use the MINUS operator in MariaDB.
I’ll explore these below and offer some solutions.
If you ever encounter a character column that should be a numeric column, there’s always a possibility that it contains non-numeric data that you don’t know about.
In MariaDB, you can run a query like the following to return non-numeric data from the column.
In MariaDB, the MINUS operator returns distinct rows from the left input query that aren’t output by the right input query.
The MINUS operator was introduced in MariaDB 10.6.1 as a synonym for the EXCEPT operator for the purposes of compatibility with Oracle. Therefore, we can use MINUS and EXCEPT interchangeably (in MariaDB 10.6.1 and later).
In MariaDB, the INTERSECT operator intersects two queries and returns only those rows that are returned in both queries.
It returns all rows from the left SELECT result set that are also present in the right SELECT result set.
In MariaDB, the EXCEPT operator returns rows from the left input query that aren’t output by the right input query.
Another way of putting it is that it returns all rows from the left SELECT result set except rows that are in right SELECT result set.