Question

I am guessing this is a noob question so please bear with me. I have a column in a mySQL table that contains both first name and last name plus other data (see table below).

fid | uid | value
 5  |  1  | John
 6  |  1  | Doe
 7  |  1  | some other data
 5  |  2  | Jane
 6  |  2  | Doe
 7  |  2  | some other data

What I would like to do is create a query where I split out the first and last names into their own columns for reporting purposes (like shown below).

First Name | Last Name
  John     |   Doe
  Jane     |   Doe

I haven’t seen this question asked before here nor have I been able to Google (perhaps using the wrong keywords). I assume this is relatively simple but it is eluding me.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You just need to join the table to itself with something like this:

select first_name.value, last_name.value
from your_table first_name
join your_table last_name on first_name.uid = last_name.uid
where first_name.fid = 5
  and last_name.fid  = 6

You can join a table to itself or join the same table multiple times as long as you use a different alias for each instance of the table.