Question

I have the following two tables

CREATE TABLE accounts (
 id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
 name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL
);

CREATE TABLE friends (
 id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
 account_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
 friend_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
 created_on TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
);

I established a JOIN query as such:

SELECT accounts.name, accounts.id, friends.account_id FROM accounts
RIGHT JOIN friends ON accounts.id = friends.account_id
ORDER BY accounts.name LIMIT 10;

It will look something like:

Mike Fenway | 1 | 3 |

Jim Morison | 3 | 1 |

The question is how do I display the friends name so that the result appear as such:

Mike Fenway | 1 | Jim Morison | 3 |

Jim Morison | 3 | Mike Fenway | 1 |

Answer 1

You need to perform a further join to get the friend data. I have used LEFT JOIN to always return the account, even if there are no friends. An INNER JOIN would return only accounts that have friends and omit those which do not.

SELECT A.id, A.name, ACC.id `friendId`, ACC.name `friendName`
FROM accounts A
LEFT JOIN friends F ON A.id = F.account_id
LEFT JOIN accounts ACC ON F.friend_id = ACC.id
ORDER BY A.name LIMIT 10;