Question

What would be an alternative to this

SELECT  i.title AS title,i.category AS category FROM table_a  WHERE REGEXP 'news'
UNION 
SELECT i.name AS title,i.categoryname AS category FROM table_b WHERE REGEXP 'news'

without using UNION? The issue we have is that we must select more rows from table_a and UNION must have rows # match. We can fake the rows in table_b by selecting different row but it just gets to confusing when we have 7 or 8 tables to mix and none of them have same number of rows or matching names. We cant use JOIN since we have noting to join them on.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can fill in the blanks with null, or some other constant that makes sense thusly:

SELECT a, b, c, d FROM t1
UNION
SELECT a, b, null, 0 FROM t2
UNION
SELECT '', b, c, 1 FROM t3