MySQL combing results - mysql

Question

I have a table users and I have a simple search query:
SELECT *
FROM users
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%'
LIMIT 10
I also have another table called follows which basically is a list of users being followed by other users. I modified the above query to search only within what particular user is following:
SELECT users.*
FROM follows
INNER JOIN users ON users.id = follows.following_id
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%' AND follows.follower_id = 18
LIMIT 10
Most of the times, the query above only returns couple of results (because I am not search the entire users table).
What I want to do is combine the above 2 queries, to return a MAXIMUM of 10 results of usernames matching a certain string with first listing the user's following, and then search the entire table of users.
I already have a solution but it requires doing this at application level by first running the 2nd query, then first, and coming the two. Is there a way I can do all of this in 1 query?
Thanks

Answer 1

One way to do this is to search the entire user table, but order the results so that followers show up first. It's a little bit hard to understand what you want without schema, sample data, and output, but something like
SELECT users.*
FROM users
LEFT JOIN follows ON users.id = follows.following_id
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%'
ORDER BY follows.follower_id = 18 DESC
LIMIT 10
Notice that I used a LEFT JOIN in order to get all of the users. A different way would be to UNION the results of the two tables and wrap in a SELECT. I don't know why you would do it this way given the other option, but it would be something like
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT users.*
FROM follows
INNER JOIN users ON users.id = follows.following_id
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%' AND follows.follower_id = 18
LIMIT 10
UNION
SELECT *
FROM users
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%'
LIMIT 10
) AS u
LIMIT 10
edit
Since the second one is working for you, I thought I throw a variation up using UNION ALL, which can be faster than UNION because it does not remove duplicate rows. You would have to make sure there were no duplicates yourself, which we can do like this
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT users.*
FROM follows
INNER JOIN users ON users.id = follows.following_id
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%' AND follows.follower_id = 18
LIMIT 10
UNION ALL
SELECT users.*
FROM follows
INNER JOIN users ON users.id = follows.following_id
WHERE username LIKE 'rya%' AND follows.follower_id != 18
LIMIT 10
) AS u
LIMIT 10