Question

Is this possible in MySQL?

Let’s say i have a table:
ID, Name

Now, i want to run a query to see if these names exists “John,James,Bill”. Assuming only the name James exists in database (ID:23, Name:James) i wish to see this result:

ID    | Name
------------
null  | John
  23  | James
null  | Bill

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You need an outer join between your table and some table that contains the list of names for which you wish to search (you can either create such a table before running your query, or materialise such a table within the query using UNION as shown below). Learn about SQL joins.

SELECT * FROM my_table NATURAL RIGHT JOIN (
  SELECT 'John' AS Name UNION ALL SELECT 'James' UNION ALL SELECT 'Bill'
) t

See it on sqlfiddle.