Question

I have one table for posts where I save the type of each post in one field. Lets say I have two types – “type1” and “type2”. I need to retrieve latest x posts from that table where x/2 posts are from “type1” and the other half is from “type2”. How is that possible using one mysql query?

Answer 1

Ok so, your table is like this:

post_text    post_type    post_date
---------    ---------    ---------
Hello World  1            2011-06-21
Foo Bar      2            2011-06-22
Fizz Buzz    2            2011-06-23
lol hai      1            2011-06-24

And you want to retrieve some number (x) of posts where half of them will be of type 1 and the other half of type 2?

One possible solution is this:

(SELECT post_text
FROM mytable
WHERE post_type = 1
ORDER BY post_date DESC
LIMIT 1)
UNION
(SELECT post_text
FROM mytable
WHERE post_type = 2
ORDER BY post_date DESC
LIMIT 1);

Of course the limit quantity should be half the desired quantity X.

This returns:

post_text    post_type    post_date
---------    ---------    ---------
lol hai      1            2011-06-24
Fizz Buzz    2            2011-06-23