MYSQL: Avoiding cartesian product of repeating records when self-joining
There are two tables: table A and table B. They have the same columns and the data is practically identical . They both have auto-incremented IDs, the only difference between the two is that they have different IDs for the same records. Among the columns, there is an IDENTIFIER column which is not unique , i.e. there are (very few) records with the same IDENTIFIER in both tables. Now, in order to find a correspondence between the IDs of table A and the IDs of table B, I have to join these two tables (for all purposes it's a self-join) on the IDENTIFIER column, something like: SELECT A.ID, B.ID