Question

I have a simple chat table with:

id, sender_id, sender_name, recipient_id, recipient_name, content

Trying to group all chats that have happened between Person A (me) and (someone else) OR (someone else) and Person A

How would someone do this ?

EDIT

Goal is to get list with all Chats where Person A is in and only list the other people.

i.e. If Person A has chats with Person B, Person C and Person D I want to show a list with Person B, Person C and Person D. Then in the next view I will show the chats with Person A and someone else.

Answer 1

select * from chat where
recipient_id in (persona, personb )
and sender_id in ( persona, personb )

EDIT:

Technically, you are not really ‘grouping’ in the SQL sense, you may be Ordering the results.

something like this:

select id, content, sender_id as other_person
from chat 
where recipient_id = persona
union
select id, content, recipient_id
from chat 
where sender_id = persona
order by other_person

also, please do consider normalizing now rather that later. your idea of ‘not querying twice’ is not correct. it will be better to not repeat the names.