Friday 18 December 2009

A couple of nice MySQL tricks

Do you want to transfer records from one table to another, specifying source and destination columns? Piece of cake:

INSERT INTO destination ( col1 , col2 )
SELECT col3, col4 FROM source


And what if you wish to collapse a subquery in your query results? More complex, but can be easily done with GROUP_CONCAT:

SELECT stuff.., GROUP_CONCAT( column_to_sum_up ) AS newname
FROM main_source
LEFT JOIN other_table_containing_things_to_collapse ON condition
GROUP BY column_in_main_source_that_explains_collapse