I don't want to any kind of JOIN here. I'm building an RSS feed of two tables using PHP, and I want to select all the rows from the two tables, keeping the rows separate but sorting by a common created column.
For example, if I have a table foo:
id downloads views created
-----------------------------------------------
1 12 23 2011-07-22 00:10:16
2 51 900 2011-07-22 10:11:45
3 8 80 2011-07-23 04:12:18
And a table bar:
id title body created
-----------------------------------------------
1 foo ogblog 2011-07-21 10:54:07
3 bar zip 2011-07-24 10:54:07
4 zip bar 2011-07-25 10:54:07
I want to select all data from both tables ordered by the common created column, so an example resultset would be (ignoring bar.id as it's not needed):
id title body downloads views created | table
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NULL bar zip NULL NULL 2011-07-24 10:54:07 | bar
NULL foo ogblog NULL NULL 2011-07-21 10:54:07 | bar
1 NULL NULL 12 23 2011-07-22 00:10:16 | foo
2 NULL NULL 51 900 2011-07-22 10:11:45 | foo
3 NULL NULL 8 80 2011-07-23 04:12:18 | foo
NULL zip bar NULL NULL 2011-07-25 10:54:07 | bar
The table column isn't needed; I added it to make things a little easier to understand.
Hopefully it's obvious what I want to do; instead of doing a JOIN where a row is generated from columns from two tables, I want to get all the row data with a common column layout where any column that doesn't exist in a table has NULL put into it.
Please let me know if you need clarification.