How to select every row N times in MySql table? - mysql

Question

I have a MySQL table like below.
ID NAME SURNAME
1 Joe Black
2 Mary Peterson
3 Bob Marley
4 Andy Murray
...
I want to write a SELECT command which will return every row N times.
Example for N = 3.
SELECT NAME, SURNAME blah-blah (3 Times ) FROM Person
NAME SURNAME
Joe Black
Joe Black
Joe Black
Mary Peterson
Mary Peterson
Mary Peterson
Bob Marley
Bob Marley
Bob Marley
Andy Murray
Andy Murray
Thank you.

Answer 1

You could use UNION ALL to get the result you want, but you'd better not do such job with SQL.
SELECT * FROM
(
SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person
UNION ALL
SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person
UNION ALL
SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person
) A ORDER BY NAME

Answer 2

I won't suggest sql to achieve this, a much simpler way would be (assuming PHP) :
$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT NAME, SURNAME blah-blah (3 Times ) FROM Person");
while($result_set = $result->fetch_array())
{
for($i=0;$i<4;$i++)
{
echo $result_set['name']." ".$result_set['sur_name']."\n";
}
}
This would give you a better control on the result set as well as, you can have more dynamic ways of handling, how the data is displayed on the page,
for. eg, if u want a particular name to be printed only once, a simple if comparison would do, which is not possible via sql!!

Answer 3

SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person, (SELECT * FROM Person limit 3) count_table;

Answer 4

The dumb manual way would be:
SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person
UNION ALL
SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person
UNION ALL
SELECT NAME, SURNAME FROM Person
Another way is to have a table with numbers in a single column running up to the maximum and doing a cross join with it WHERE number <= n

Answer 5

what about go through looping it in stored procedure like that :
delimiter //
CREATE PROCEDURE ntimes()
BEGIN
DECLARE i INT DEFAULT 0;
SET i = 0;
WHILE i < 3 DO
SELECT `Code`, `Rank` FROM Table1;
SET i = i + 1;
END WHILE;
END;
//
DELIMITER ;
Here you just change 3 to what number of repeats you want , and you dont need mass of unions .