Generate an integer sequence in MySQL

Question

I need to do a join with a table/result-set/whatever that has the integers n to m inclusive. Is there a trivial way to get that without just buildi

Answer 1

Here is a compact binary version of the technique used in other answers here:

select ((((((b7.0 << 1 | b6.0) << 1 | b5.0) << 1 | b4.0) 
                  << 1 | b3.0) << 1 | b2.0) << 1 | b1.0) << 1 | b0.0 as n
from (select 0 union all select 1) as b0,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b1,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b2,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b3,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b4,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b5,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b6,
     (select 0 union all select 1) as b7

There are no unique or sorting phases, no string to number conversion, no arithmetic operations, and each dummy table only has 2 rows, so it should be pretty fast.

This version uses 8 "bits" so it counts from 0 to 255, but you can easily tweak that.