How to get next/previous record in MySQL?

Question

Say I have records with IDs 3,4,7,9 and I want to be able to go from one to another by navigation via next/previous links. The problem is, that I don't know how to fetch record with nearest higher ID.

So when I have a record with ID 4, I need to be able to fetch next existing record, which would be 7. The query would probably look something like

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE id = 4 OFFSET 1

How can I fetch next/previous record without fetching the whole result set and manually iterating?

I'm using MySQL 5.

Answer 1

All the above solutions require two database calls. The below sql code combine two sql statements into one.

select * from foo 
where ( 
        id = IFNULL((select min(id) from foo where id > 4),0) 
        or  id = IFNULL((select max(id) from foo where id < 4),0)
      )    

Answer 2

next:

select * from foo where id = (select min(id) from foo where id > 4)

previous:

select * from foo where id = (select max(id) from foo where id < 4)

Answer 3

Optimising @Don approach to use only One Query

SELECT * from (
  SELECT 
     @rownum:=@rownum+1 row,
     CASE a.id WHEN 'CurrentArticleID' THEN @currentrow:=@rownum ELSE NULL END as 'current_row',
     a.*  
  FROM articles a,
     (SELECT @currentrow:=0) c,  
     (SELECT @rownum:=0) r
   ORDER BY `date`, id  DESC
 ) as article_with_row
 where row > @currentrow - 2
 limit 3

change CurrentArticleID with current article ID like

SELECT * from (
  SELECT 
     @rownum:=@rownum+1 row,
     CASE a.id WHEN '100' THEN @currentrow:=@rownum ELSE NULL END as 'current_row',
     a.*  
  FROM articles a,
     (SELECT @currentrow:=0) c,  
     (SELECT @rownum:=0) r
   ORDER BY `date`, id  DESC
 ) as article_with_row
 where row > @currentrow - 2
 limit 3

Answer 4

Here we have a way to fetch previous and next records using single MySQL query. Where 5 is the id of current record.

select * from story where catagory=100 and  (
    id =(select max(id) from story where id < 5 and catagory=100 and order by created_at desc) 
    OR 
    id=(select min(id) from story where id > 5 and catagory=100 order by created_at desc) )

Answer 5

There's another trick you can use to show columns from previous rows, using any ordering you want, using a variable similar to the @row trick:

SELECT @prev_col_a, @prev_col_b, @prev_col_c,
   @prev_col_a := col_a AS col_a,
   @prev_col_b := col_b AS col_b,
   @prev_col_c := col_c AS col_c
FROM table, (SELECT @prev_col_a := NULL, @prev_col_b := NULL, @prev_col_c := NULL) prv
ORDER BY whatever

Apparently, the select columns are evaluated in order, so this will first select the saved variables, and then update the variables to the new row (selecting them in the process).

NB: I'm not sure that this is defined behaviour, but I've used it and it works.

Answer 6

Try this example.

create table student(id int, name varchar(30), age int);

insert into student values
(1 ,'Ranga', 27),
(2 ,'Reddy', 26),
(3 ,'Vasu',  50),
(5 ,'Manoj', 10),
(6 ,'Raja',  52),
(7 ,'Vinod', 27);

SELECT name,
       (SELECT name FROM student s1
        WHERE s1.id < s.id
        ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1) as previous_name,
       (SELECT name FROM student s2
        WHERE s2.id > s.id
        ORDER BY id ASC LIMIT 1) as next_name
FROM student s
    WHERE id = 7; 

Note: If value is not found then it will return null.

In the above example, Previous value will be Raja and Next value will be null because there is no next value.