unifying two or more sql query results

[shane3341436]

I need to unite two or more sql query results into one single array of results.
The two tables have unequal number of columns. I tried to do this by
for an example:

$sql="SELECT P_id id,P_fname name,P_lname lname,P_address address FROM person";
$sql .=" union ";
$sql .="SELECT C_id id,C_name name,C_name lname,C_address address FROM company";
 

Here I used C_name twice just to fit within union. If I remove the second one the sql doesn't work.
My problem is what if the first table has many columns ,say 10 and the second table has only 4 or 5 columns. I have to repeat one of the columns just to fit the 'union'. Is there any other ways to unite them

[Atli]

Hi Shane.

the UNION syntax expects that the SELECT statements return the same amount of columns. There is no way to bypass that.

You could of course use the CONCAT() function to splice together the first and last names in the person table, if that works for you.

Why do you want to unify those results? Why not just use two separate queries?

[shane3341436]

thanx for the response.
I wanted to unify those results so that I could use the result in single while loop. Otherwise I must have to repeat the while loops many times if there are many tables. The above query is only the example

[pbmods]

Heya, Shane.

Sounds like you might want to rethink your database design.

You'd have no good way to determine when you had hit the end of a table in your result set if you used a UNION anyway.