Question

See, I’ve got this bulletin board. This query here works just fine.

    SELECT bulletin.date,
        bulletin.title,
        bulletin.content,
        bulletin.id,
        bulletin.made_by,
        users.ID,
        users.name
    FROM bulletin, users
    WHERE bulletin.id = '12345'
        AND bulletin.made_by = users.ID
    LIMIT 1

Now, I’m running into troubles because when a user deletes his account there is no information about said person left, he is deleted from the users table. I know there may be other ways to deal with this but I can’t fix that now.

So I ask: How can I make that query return bulletin.date, bulletin.title and bulletin.content where bulletin.id is equal to 12345 even though I’ve got “AND bulletin.made_by = users.ID”? You see, I need to have that for all the other posts where the user still exists.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Use a LEFT OUTER JOIN

SELECT b.date,
       b.title,
       b.content,
       b.id,
       b.made_by,
       b.ID,
       b.name
FROM bulletin b
LEFT OUTER JOIN users u on b.made_by = u.ID
WHERE b.id = '12345'
LIMIT 1

See this great explanation of joins