Question

I’ve been working with mysql for a while but I’d never come across a problem where I had to use a condition up to now. Basically I need to do this (the best way for me to explain it is to write it as if mysql supported php like conditions):

SELECT `Gender`=='male' ? '0.5' : '1' AS Col1 FROM Users

Basically I want to have a 0.5 AS Col1 for all ‘males’ and a 1 for all ‘females’.

Eg:

UID Gender
1   male
2   female
3   male

Should return:

UID Col1
1   0.5
2   1
3   0.5

If you are wondering about the implementation. I want to recommend users “who to follow” based on their common habits. (0.5 to men means that they follow twice the number of women as men).

How can this be done?

Answer 1

You can use

SELECT if(`Gender`='male','0.5','1') AS Col1
FROM Users

or

SELECT case when `Gender`='male'
            then '0.5'
            else '1'
       end AS Col1
FROM Users