Question

I’m making a simple forum search for my site, which pulls data from 2 tables.

SELECT ft.id, ft.title, ft.date 
  FROM forum_topics ft 
  WHERE ft.title LIKE '%" .$search. "%' OR ft.body LIKE '%" .$search. "%' 
UNION SELECT fr.topic, ft.title, fr.date 
  FROM forum_replies fr 
    INNER JOIN forum_topics ft ON fr.topic=ft.id 
  WHERE fr.body LIKE '%" .$search. "%' 
ORDER BY date DESC

It’s pulling duplicates if it finds the term in both tables, how can I make it so it wont show duplicate records if the id of the result is the same.

Answer 1

You can try wrapping the UNION in another select, and add a GROUP BY on all columns:

SELECT g.id, g.title, g.date
FROM (
    SELECT ft.id, ft.title, ft.date 
    FROM forum_topics ft 
    WHERE ft.title LIKE '%" .$search. "%' OR ft.body LIKE '%" .$search. "%' 
    UNION
    SELECT fr.topic as id, ft.title, fr.date 
    FROM forum_replies fr 
    INNER JOIN forum_topics ft ON fr.topic=ft.id 
    WHERE fr.body LIKE '%" .$search. "%' 
) g
GROUP BY g.id, g.title, g.date
ORDER BY g.date DESC