Group_concat with columns of a particular type in the first

Question

My tables are:

Parent_Child (Parent_SSN, Child_SSN)
Person (SSN, Name, age, sex)
School (Child_SSN, School_Name)

I want to select the parents(female,male) who have atleast one of their children in a particular school 'X' .I have a working query and my mysql query is:

select group_concat(p.name) from person p,parentchild pc,school s 
where s.schoolname='X' and s.childssn=pc.childssn and p.ssn=pc.parentssn 
group by pc.childssn

This displays the result as parent(male,female) but I want the result in (female,male) form and if I group it by parent.sex it displays results in individual rows and not in a single row.I am out of ideas.

Sample desired output:

name

Angela,Jim

Output of my above existing query:

name

Jim,Angela

Answer 1

Here's a Sql Fiddle for you.

SELECT DISTINCT group_concat(p.name ORDER BY p.sex Asc) 
FROM Person p JOIN Parent_Child pc ON p.ssn=pc.Parent_SSN 
          JOIN School s  ON s.Child_SSN = pc.Child_SSN
WHERE s.School_Name='X' 
GROUP By pc.Child_SSN;

Answer 2

Try this, might possible using sort

 SELECT GROUP_CONCAT( p.name ORDER BY p.name DESC ) from person p,parentchild pc,school s 
where s.schoolname='X' and s.childssn=pc.childssn and p.ssn=pc.parentssn 
group by pc.childssn

Answer 3

You can use ORDER BY inside the GROUP_CONCAT function in this way :

Try this

SELECT group_concat(DISTINCT p.name ORDER BY p.name Asc) 
FROM person p JOIN parentchild pc ON p.ssn=pc.parentssn 
              JOIN school s  ON s.childssn = pc.childssn
WHERE s.schoolname='X' 
GROUP By pc.childssn

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-functions.html#function%5Fgroup-concat

Answer 4

I somehow managed to get the results using join here is my working query.

select * from (select distinct p.name from person p,parentchild pc,school s where s.schoolname='X' and s.childssn=pc.childssn and p.ssn=pc.parentssn and p.sex='F')q1 join (select distinct p.name from person p,parentchild pc,school s where s.schoolname='X' and s.childssn=pc.childssn and p.ssn=pc.parentssn and p.sex='M')q

I want to still know whether it is possible to sort items by a particular condition in group_concat result set which will affect it's postion in the group_concat result set.