Question

I have a table with the format

ID NAME     NICKNAME MENTOR_NAME MENTOR_NICKNAME
------------------------------------------------
01 Nolan    Nole     Jonathan    Jones
02 Jonathan Jones 

The fields MENTOR_NAME and MENTOR_NICKNAME contain existing names (save for typos) of existing NAME and NICKNAME combinations.

To avoid the typo problem i want to replace MENTOR_NAME and MENTOR_NICKNAME with a MENTOR_ID resulting in a table like:

ID NAME     NICKNAME MENTOR_ID
------------------------------
01 Nolan    Nole     02
02 Jonathan Jonas

What i cant figure out is the query syntax so that i can avoid going through each record doing it by hand or having to write a php script just for this.

Can anyone help me with a query to make this transformation?

EDIT: Added example data.

Answer 1

This is to update existing table :-

update the_table as a,
the_table as b
set a.mentor_id = b.mentor_id
where a.name = b.mentor_name and a.nickname = b.mentor_nickname;

If you want to copy into another table :-

create table another_table
select a.id, a.name, a.nickname, b.mentor_id
from the_table as a
inner join the_table as b
on (a.name=b.mentor_name and a.nickname=b.mentor_nickname);