Question

A bit of a strange one, I want to write a MySQL query that will get results from a table, but prefer one value of a column over another, ie

id   name    value   prioirty
1    name1   value1  NULL
2    name1   value1  1
3    name2   value2  NULL
4    name3   value3  NULL

So here name1 has two entries, but one has a prioirty of 1. I want to get all the values from the table, but prefer the values with whatever priorty I’m after.

The results I’d be after would be

id   name    value   prioirty
2    name1   value1  1
3    name2   value2  NULL
4    name3   value3  NULL

An equivalent way of saying it would be ‘get all rows from the table, but prefer rows with a priority of x’.

Answer 1

You need to redesign your table first.

It should be:

YourTable (Id, Name, Value)
YourTablePriority (PriorityId, Priority, Id)

Update:

select * from YourTable a 
where a.Id not in 
   (select b.Id from YourTablePriority b)

This should work in sql server, you may need a little change to make it work in mysql.