Subqueries in SELECT clause

Question

Your question seems to be this:

how to concat the words into phrases AND concat the phrases into one string

Let's break it down. You need to join together five tables. Three of them are physical tables, namely item, meaning, and status. From those tables you get the references to the result set items you need called itemID and level, and you get the relationship between items and their meanings.

The other two tables you need are virtual tables (that is, subqueries). One of these gives you your French language phrases, and the other gives you your English-language translations.

Let us create the two queries for the virtual tables. Let's put the words into phrases first. A query like this achieves that goal.

 SELECT subItem.studyPhraseID,
        GROUP_CONCAT(word.string 
                     ORDER BY phrase_word.wordIndex 
                     SEPARATOR ' ') AS studyPhraseString
   FROM word 
  INNER JOIN phrase_word ON word.wordID=phrase_word.wordID
  INNER JOIN item AS subItem ON phrase_word.phraseID=subItem.studyPhraseID 
  GROUP BY subItem.studyPhraseID

This gives you a resultset table of phrase ID numbers and the phrases. Here's a SQL fiddle for this one based on your samples. http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/11ae2/9/0

Then, create a similar query giving you the meaningPhraseString values.

 SELECT meaning.meaningPhraseID,
        GROUP_CONCAT(word.string 
        ORDER BY phrase_word.wordIndex
        SEPARATOR ' ') AS meaningPhraseString
   FROM word 
  INNER JOIN phrase_word ON word.wordID=phrase_word.wordID
  INNER JOIN meaning ON phrase_word.phraseID=meaning.meaningPhraseID
  INNER JOIN item AS subItem ON meaning.itemID=subItem.itemID 
  GROUP BY meaning.meaningPhraseID

This gives a list of ids and meaning phrases. Here's the fiddle. http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/11ae2/6/0

So, we're going to need a five-way join (three physical tables and two subqueries) to get to our final result set. In summary, it will look like this:

 SELECT i.itemID, 
        s.level,
        sp.studyPhraseString,
        mp.meaningPhraseString            
   FROM item AS i
   JOIN meaning AS m ON i.itemID = m.itemID
   JOIN status AS s ON i.itemID = s.itemID
   JOIN ( 
           /* the studyPhrase subquery */ 
        ) AS sp ON i.studyPhraseID = sp.studyPhraseID   
   JOIN ( 
           /* the meaningPhrase subquery */ 
        ) AS mp ON m.meaningPhraseID = mp.meaningPhraseID

The trick here is that you can use a query (or virtual table) and a physical table interchangeably. So when you need to summarize a bunch of tables, you create a query to do that and then paste it into JOIN (/*query*/) AS alias.

Finally, you need to create the comma-joined strings (e.g. to fly, to steal) by adding yet another GROUP_CONCAT() and GROUP BY to your query. The end result is then

 SELECT i.itemID, 
        s.level,
        sp.studyPhraseString,
        GROUP_CONCAT(mp.meaningPhraseString
                     SEPARATOR ', ') AS meaningPhraseStrings            
   FROM item AS i
   JOIN meaning AS m ON i.itemID = m.itemID
   JOIN status AS s ON i.itemID = s.itemID
   JOIN ( 
           /* the studyPhrase subquery */ 
        ) AS sp ON i.studyPhraseID = sp.studyPhraseID   
   JOIN ( 
           /* the meaningPhrase subquery */ 
        ) AS mp ON m.meaningPhraseID = mp.meaningPhraseID
  GROUP BY i.itemID, s.level, sp.studyPhraseString
  ORDER BY i.itemID, s.level, sp.studyPhraseString

And that is your query. http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/11ae2/16/0 It definitely takes advantage of the Structured in Structured Query Language.

Subqueries in SELECT clause

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