How to write mysql subselect properly with conditions and limiting - mysql

Question

I have three Tables:
Posts:
id, title, authorId, text
authors:
id, name, country
Comments:
id, authorId, text, postId
I want to run a mysql command which selects the first 5 posts which were written by authors, whose country is 'Ireland'. In the same call, I want to retrieve all the comments for those five posts, and also the author info.
I've tried the following:
SELECT posts.id as 'posts.id', posts.title as 'posts.title' (etc. etc. list all fields in three table)
FROM
(SELECT * FROM posts, authors WHERE authors.country = 'ireland' AND authors.id = posts.authorId LIMIT 0, 5 ) as posts
LEFT JOIN
comments ON comments.postId = posts.id,
authors
WHERE
authors.id = posts.authorId
I had to include every field with an alias ^ because there was a duplicate for id, and more fields in future may become duplicates as I'm looking for a generic solution.
My two questions are:
1) I am getting a duplicate field entry from within my subselect for id, so do I have to list out all my fields as aliases again within the subselect or is there only one field I need for a subselect
2) Is there a way to auto-alias my call? At the moment I've just aliased every field in the main select but can it do this for me so there are no duplicates?
Sorry if this isn't very clear it's a bit of a messy problem! Thanks.

Answer 1

You are doing an unnecessary join back to the author table in your query. You get all the fields you want in the posts subquery. I would rename this to something other than an existing table, perhaps pa to indicate posts and authors.
You say you want the first 5 posts, but have no order clause. A better form of the query is:
SELECT pa.id as 'posts.id', pa.title as 'posts.title' (etc. etc. list all fields in three table)
FROM (SELECT *
FROM posts join
authors
on authors.id = posts.authorId
WHERE authors.country = 'ireland'
order by post.date
LIMIT 0, 5
) pa LEFT JOIN
comments c
ON c.postId = pa.id
Note that this returns the first five posts and their authors (as specified in the question). But one author may be responsible for all five posts.
In MySQL, you can use * and it will get rid of duplicate aliases in the from clause. I think this is dangerous. It is better to list all the columns you want.

Answer 2

To answer your questions:
You can select as many (or as few) columns as you need from a sub-query
You do not need to join the authors table again since you already selected all fields in the sub-query (and so get rid of duplicate columns names).
A few additional remarks...
... about the JOIN syntax
Prefer the form
FROM t1 JOIN t2 ON (t1.fk = t2.pk)
to the obsolete, obscure
FROM t1, t2 WHERE t1.fk = t2.pk
... about the use of a LIMIT clause without an ORDER BY clause
The order in which rows are returned by a SELECT statement without an ORDER BY clause is undefined. Therefore, a LIMIT n clause without an ORDER BY clause could return any n rows in theory.
Your final query should look like this:
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT *
FROM posts
JOIN authors ON (authors.id = posts.authorId )
WHERE authors.country = 'ireland'
ORDER BY posts.id DESC -- assuming this column is monotonically increasing
LIMIT 5
) AS last_posts
LEFT JOIN comments ON ( comments.postId = last_posts .id )