Take the 2-minute tour ×  I have the following table for storing
user data:   TABLE: users maritalStatus (INT)   - FK gender
(CHAR) occupation    (INT)   - FK  Now I want to compare two
users in this table to see how many columns match for any two
given users (say user X & user Y)  I am doing it via mySQL
Stored Procedures by getting each value separately and then
comparing them       SELECT maritalStatus from users where
userID = X INTO myVar1;     SELECT maritalStatus from users
where userID = Y INTO myVar2;      IF myVar1 = myVar2 THEN
END IF;  Is there a shorter way using an SQL query where I can
compare two rows in a table and see which columns are different?
I dont need to know how much different they actually are, just
need to know if they contain the same value. Also I will only be
comparing selected columns, not every column in the user table.
share|improve this question  4 Answers 4  up vote 4 down vote
accepted  This will select the number of columns that are not
the same for user x a