How do I use properly CASE..WHEN in MySQL

Question

Here is a demo query, notice it is very simple, Fetches only where base_price is 0, And still, it chooses the condition 3:

SELECT
   CASE course_enrollment_s         


        

Answer 1

There are two variants of CASE, and you're not using the one that you think you are.

What you're doing

CASE case_value
    WHEN when_value THEN statement_list
    [WHEN when_value THEN statement_list] ...
    [ELSE statement_list]
END CASE

Each condition is loosely equivalent to a if (case_value == when_value) (pseudo-code).

However, you've put an entire condition as when_value, leading to something like:

if (case_value == (case_value > 100))

Now, (case_value > 100) evaluates to FALSE, and is the only one of your conditions to do so. So, now you have:

if (case_value == FALSE)

FALSE converts to 0 and, through the resulting full expression if (case_value == 0) you can now see why the third condition fires.

What you're supposed to do

Drop the first course_enrollment_settings so that there's no case_value, causing MySQL to know that you intend to use the second variant of CASE:

CASE
    WHEN search_condition THEN statement_list
    [WHEN search_condition THEN statement_list] ...
    [ELSE statement_list]
END CASE

Now you can provide your full conditionals as search_condition.

Also, please read the documentation for features that you use.