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[SOLVED] Union query giving unexpected results

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 3:57 am
by impulse()
I've been asked to modify a script which has a union query to fetch data from 2 different tables. Both tables have different amount of columns with different names but essentially they store the same data. At the moment the query includes something like:

"SELECT something AS otherTablesColumnName"

so the union query works OK and it does work OK. But I'm being asked to include as column from table 1 which isn't in table 2. I've tried to trick MySQL into doing this by adding an extra column to table 2 named 'notused' then including:

'SELECT notused AS columnIWantFromTable1"

And this kind of works because it fetches the first character from the field in table 1 but nothing else. Could somebody explain why this happens please?

If you need more information I will be checking this thread regularly throughout the day.

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 4:13 am
by impulse()
Solved now.

I'd only put a varchar(1) column in the table without the extra field which was setting the column type and length.