Question

I have two tables, let’s call them meetings and phone calls. They both implement an “event” interface, and therefore have common fields between them such as date, subject, participants, etc etc.

I would like to run a query to grab both meetings and phone calls in one result set, and sort them by date. Is this possible?

Thx for reading!

Answer 1

You can do this:

(select time, subject from meetings
union all
select time, subject from phonecalls)
)
order by time

Alternatively, you can map two classes to three tables:

create table events ( -- common columns go here
    event_id bigint
,   event_time datetime
,   event_subject varchar(max)
)

create table phone_calls (
    event_id bigint
,   phone_number varchar(24)
)

create table meetings (
    event_id bigint
,   location varchar(max)
)

This way, all common data will end up in the same table. Reading would be a bit more complex, because you would need to join to the event table to get the common fields. Anyway, there are pluses and minuses to each alternative, the choice is up to you.