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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T00:29:27+00:00

Imagine I have table1 which has a column named ‘table_name’. I use table1 .table_name

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Imagine I have table1 which has a column named ‘table_name’. I use table1.table_name to store the name of another table in the database. The referenceable tables would all have a field ‘target_id.

Is is possible to use table_name in a JOIN statement?

For example:

SELECT t1.*, t2.* FROM table1 AS t1
                  JOIN table1.table_name AS t2 ON t1.table1_id = t2.target_id

The obvious solution is to use the script (C++ in my case) to get the table name first, and construct a SQL query from it. The question is: can we bypass the script and do this directly in SQL (MySQL)?

Edit: What is dynamic SQL?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The only chance you have is to do 2 SQL statements:

    • select the tablename you need
    • use this table-name to dynamically build the secound query to get the data you need – what you want isn’t possible to do with SQL directly (and it sounds like you’ve designed your database wrong in some way – but that’s hard to say without knowing what’s the goal of it).
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