joining tables while keeping the Null values
- by Tam
I have two tables:
Users: ID, first_name, last_name
Networks: user_id, friend_id, status
I want to select all values from the users table but I want to display the status of specific user (say with id=2) while keeping the other ones as NULL. For instance:
If I have users:
1 John Smith
2 Tom Summers
3 Amy Wilson
And in networks:
user_id friend_id status
2 1 friends
I want to do search for John Smith for all other users so I want to get:
id first_name last_name status
2 Tom Summers friends
3 Amy Wilson NULL
I tried doing LEFT JOIN and then WHERE statement but it didn't work because it excluded the rows that have relations with other users but not this user.
I can do this using UNION statement but I was wondering if it's at all possible to do it without UNION.
