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12.2.8.3. UNION Syntax

SELECT ...
UNION [ALL | DISTINCT] SELECT ...
[UNION [ALL | DISTINCT] SELECT ...]

UNION is used to combine the result from multiple SELECT statements into a single result set.

The column names from the first SELECT statement are used as the column names for the results returned. Selected columns listed in corresponding positions of each SELECT statement should have the same data type. (For example, the first column selected by the first statement should have the same type as the first column selected by the other statements.)

If the data types of corresponding SELECT columns do not match, the types and lengths of the columns in the UNION result take into account the values retrieved by all of the SELECT statements. For example, consider the following: 

mysql> SELECT REPEAT('a',1) UNION SELECT REPEAT('b',10);
+---------------+
| REPEAT('a',1) |
+---------------+
| a             |
| bbbbbbbbbb    |
+---------------+

(In some earlier versions of MySQL, only the type and length from the first SELECT would have been used and the second row would have been truncated to a length of 1.)

The SELECT statements are normal select statements, but with the following restrictions:

  • Only the last SELECT statement can use INTO OUTFILE. (However, the entire UNION result is written to the file.)

  • HIGH_PRIORITY cannot be used with SELECT statements that are part of a UNION. If you specify it for the first SELECT, it has no effect. If you specify it for any subsequent SELECT statements, a syntax error results.

The default behavior for UNION is that duplicate rows are removed from the result. The optional DISTINCT keyword has no effect other than the default because it also specifies duplicate-row removal. With the optional ALL keyword, duplicate-row removal does not occur and the result includes all matching rows from all the SELECT statements.

You can mix UNION ALL and UNION DISTINCT in the same query. Mixed UNION types are treated such that a DISTINCT union overrides any ALL union to its left. A DISTINCT union can be produced explicitly by using UNION DISTINCT or implicitly by using UNION with no following DISTINCT or ALL keyword.

To use an ORDER BY or LIMIT clause to sort or limit the entire UNION result, parenthesize the individual SELECT statements and place the ORDER BY or LIMIT after the last one. The following example uses both clauses: 

(SELECT a FROM t1 WHERE a=10 AND B=1)
UNION
(SELECT a FROM t2 WHERE a=11 AND B=2)
ORDER BY a LIMIT 10;

This kind of ORDER BY cannot use column references that include a table name (that is, names in tbl_name.col_name format). Instead, provide a column alias in the first SELECT statement and refer to the alias in the ORDER BY. (Alternatively, refer to the column in the ORDER BY using its column position. However, use of column positions is deprecated.)

Also, if a column to be sorted is aliased, the ORDER BY clause must refer to the alias, not the column name. The first of the following statements will work, but the second will fail with an Unknown column 'a' in 'order clause' error: 

(SELECT a AS b FROM t) UNION (SELECT ...) ORDER BY b;
(SELECT a AS b FROM t) UNION (SELECT ...) ORDER BY a;

To apply ORDER BY or LIMIT to an individual SELECT, place the clause inside the parentheses that enclose the SELECT: 

(SELECT a FROM t1 WHERE a=10 AND B=1 ORDER BY a LIMIT 10)
UNION
(SELECT a FROM t2 WHERE a=11 AND B=2 ORDER BY a LIMIT 10);

However, use of ORDER BY for individual SELECT statements implies nothing about the order in which the rows appear in the final result because UNION by default produces an unordered set of rows. Therefore, the use of ORDER BY in this context is typically in conjunction with LIMIT, so that it is used to determine the subset of the selected rows to retrieve for the SELECT, even though it does not necessarily affect the order of those rows in the final UNION result. If ORDER BY appears without LIMIT in a SELECT, it is optimized away because it will have no effect anyway.

To cause rows in a UNION result to consist of the sets of rows retrieved by each SELECT one after the other, select an additional column in each SELECT to use as a sort column and add an ORDER BY following the last SELECT: 

(SELECT 1 AS sort_col, col1a, col1b, ... FROM t1)
UNION
(SELECT 2, col2a, col2b, ... FROM t2) ORDER BY sort_col;

To additionally maintain sort order within individual SELECT results, add a secondary column to the ORDER BY clause: 

(SELECT 1 AS sort_col, col1a, col1b, ... FROM t1)
UNION
(SELECT 2, col2a, col2b, ... FROM t2) ORDER BY sort_col, col1a;

Use of an additional column also enables you to determine which SELECT each row comes from. Extra columns can provide other identifying information as well, such as a string that indicates a table name.


User Comments

Posted by Keith Ivey on May 8 2003 9:10am[Delete] [Edit]

It's not documented above, but you can use ORDER BY on a UNION that consists of only one SELECT (and thus doesn't actually include the word "UNION"). Suppose you want the last 5 entries in a table, but you want them in ascending order. You can use this query:

( SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY ranking DESC
LIMIT 5 ) ORDER BY ranking;

Similarly, you could select the top 10 records from a table ordered by one column and then sort them alphabetically by another column.

Posted by [name withheld] on September 1 2003 6:57pm[Delete] [Edit]

An alternative, rather simpler (especially with very complex select statements) way to 'use union' in 3.x might be the following:

Build a nice union query. (save it somewhere, so you can use that if you upgrade)
If you would say that query was '(*cool_select_statement_1*) UNION (*cool_select_statement_2*) *order_and_group_by_stuff*'.
You could make an replacement set of query's like this:
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE temp_union TYPE=HEAP *cool_select_statement_1*;
INSERT INTO temp_union *cool_select_statement_2*;
SELECT * FROM temp_union *order_and_group_by_stuff*;
DROP TABLE temp_union;

Note that I've use a HEAP and TEMPORARY table because that combination is rather fast and, well, temporary.
You can't execute these query's on one line (well I coudn't), so it would look like this in PHP:
mysql_query('CREATE..', $connection);
mysql_query('INSERT..', $connection);
$query = mysql_query('SELECT..', $connection);
mysql_query('DROP..', $connection);

Posted by Phil McCarley on February 28 2006 6:37am[Delete] [Edit]

In addition to the above comment regarding the ORDERing of individual SELECTS, I was after a way to do exactly what is says wouldn't work. I have two playlists, and to get the correct order I need to use two different ORDER clauses, also I wanted to use the DISTINCT functionality of the UNION syntax.

What I needed was the contents of each playlist to be ordered in there specific way, while the first appeared wholly before the second. Also, I couldn't use the various tricks of adding extra colums to sort on because that left me with non-unique rows and therefore if the same entry was in both lists, the duplicate didn't get removed.

How I overcame this was to use subqueries, as follows:

SELECT song_id FROM
(SELECT song_id FROM play_immediate
ORDER BY play_id DESC) AS t1

UNION

SELECT song_id FROM
(SELECT song_id FROM play_later
ORDER BY play_id) AS t2

And using this I am able to sort each list differently, one ascending and one descending, keep the 'immediate' list before the 'later' list but still remove all duplicates.

Hope this helps others.

Posted by James McGuigan on June 14 2006 9:39am[Delete] [Edit]

If you want to run a WHERE statement on the result of a UNION, you can make the union into a subquery like such:

SELECT * FROM ((
SELECT * FROM table1
WHERE ...
ORDER BY ...
LIMIT ...
) UNION (
SELECT * FROM table2
WHERE ...
ORDER BY ...
LIMIT ...
)) as t
WHERE ...
ORDER BY ...

Posted by [name withheld] on June 24 2006 8:41pm[Delete] [Edit]

I had a problem with a nested JOIN-Statement... nested in a UNION... Worked fine with mySql 5.0.20, but with 4.0.27 it just wouldn't... Found a workaround using IN():

Goal: For a given Article-ID and a table 'tblseealso' with an ID-List of articles: get sorted list of all referenced (to and by) articles.

Statement for 5.0.20:

SELECT DISTINCT `tblarts`.* FROM
(
(
SELECT `tblseealso`.`ID2` AS `ID` FROM `tblseealso`
WHERE `tblseealso`.`ID1` = 1234
)
UNION
(
SELECT `tblseealso`.`ID1` AS `ID` FROM `tblseealso`
WHERE `tblseealso`.`ID2` = 1234
)
) AS `Liste`
INNER JOIN `tblarts` ON `Liste`.`ID` = `tblarts`.`ID`
ORDER BY `tblarts`.`Titel`

The alternative for 4.0.27:

SELECT * FROM
(
SELECT `tblarts`.* FROM `tblarts`
WHERE
(
`tblarts`.`ID` IN
(
SELECT `tblseealso`.`ID2` FROM `tblseealso`
WHERE `tblseealso`.`ID1` = 1234
)
)
OR
(
`tblarts`.`ID` IN
(
SELECT `tblseealso`.`ID1` FROM `tblseealso`
WHERE `tblseealso`.`ID2` = 1234
)
)
) AS `Liste`
ORDER BY `Liste`.`Titel`

Note: Without nesting in the outer SELECT-Statement the ORDER BY-clause causes a "memory overload"?!

Hope this maybe helps someone... if only because someone adds a comment with a better solution ;o)

Posted by Peter Phillips on July 26 2006 5:48pm[Delete] [Edit]

"As of MySQL 4.1.1, if the data types of corresponding SELECT columns do not match, the types and lengths of the columns in the UNION result take into account the values retrieved by all of the SELECT statements."

Here's an example work around for the issue described above and MySQL 4.0.x.

You can cause MySQL to reserve enough space for your columns like by starting with a placeholder statement:

(
SELECT
id, '1234567890123456789012345678901234567890' as matched_by
FROM
customer
WHERE
1=0
)
UNION ALL
(
SELECT
id, 'pet' as matched_by
FROM
customer
WHERE
pet = 'rock'
)
UNION ALL
(
SELECT
id, 'first_name' as matched_by
FROM
customer
WHERE
first_name = 'Peter'
)
UNION ALL
(
SELECT
id, 'last_name' as matched_by
FROM
customer
WHERE
last_name = 'Phillips'
)

For anyone who is wondering why this issue is important, consider that ORs tend to be very slow in MySQL 4.x however UNIONs tend to be fast. Frequently WHERE clauses that would be written with ORs are turned into separate SQL statements joined with UNION and/or UNION ALL.

Posted by Kim Mihaly on October 4 2006 5:35am[Delete] [Edit]

For an app I was writing I needed to list both parent & child for a 2 level tree - the first half of the union returns all the parents , the second all the children for these parents - as I was using the pear html_pager I also added a limit clause....

select parent.categoryid, parent.categoryname, parent.sequence as seq, parent.categoryid as id, '' as name, 0 as seq1
from category as parent
where parent.isasubcategoryof = 0
union
select parent.categoryid, parent.categoryname, parent.sequence as seq, child.categoryid as id, child.categoryname as name, child.sequence as seq1
from category as parent, category as child
where (child.isasubcategoryof = parent.categoryid)
order by seq, seq1

Posted by Steve Owen on January 15 2008 5:37pm[Delete] [Edit]

In response to Phil McCarley's excellent post from February 28 2006, can I give another example where this might help?

I wanted to get the results from a table where an inner join brought about a resultset, but also wanted to display other possible values that weren't in the resultset so that they could be added. It was implemented as a single list with the existing resultset ticked. I also didn't want duplicates, and wanted the ticked items to appear at the top. This was solved using Phil's sub-query suggestion as follows:

SELECT * FROM (
(SELECT 1 AS ticked, col1, col2 FROM table1 INNER JOIN table2 USING (col3))
UNION
(SELECT 0 AS ticked, col1, col2 FROM table1)
) AS combined_table /*derived tables need a unique name*/
GROUP BY col1 /*group by the unique col1 to stop duplicates*/
ORDER BY ticked DESC

Posted by Wilco Kuipers on March 5 2008 4:13pm[Delete] [Edit]

I noticed individual ordering is not working.

Example: (SELECT * FROM `table1` WHERE `active` = '1' ORDER BY `price` ASC) UNION (SELECT * FROM `table1` WHERE `active` = '0' ORDER BY `price` ASC)

When adding a individual LIMIT to each query, it works.

Example: (SELECT * FROM `table1` WHERE `active` = '1' ORDER BY `price` ASC LIMIT 30) UNION (SELECT * FROM `table1` WHERE `active` = '0' ORDER BY `price` ASC LIMIT 30)

Posted by Xty Y on March 26 2008 6:42pm[Delete] [Edit]

Wilco Kuipers:
That... is exactly what it says up in the article.

UNIONs explicitly return an unordered list unless you sort the UNION as a whole. Thus, any orderings in the source SELECTs are optimized away unless they are accompanied by a LIMIT (because then they still actually do something).

Posted by Stephen Dewey on May 20 2008 3:55pm[Delete] [Edit]

WARNING: Although the manual above encourages the use of sorting columns if you want the UNION'd result sets to be displayed sequentially, using sort columns will effectively prevent the default UNION behavior of filtering out duplicate rows (i.e. UNION DISTINCT), because your sort column value will be different in the different result sets.

There are various ways of getting around this, depending on what you are sorting and why. Just write a different kind of ORDER BY clause and bear this in mind.

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