The used SELECT statements have a different number of columns (REDUX!!)

Question

There\'s another question out there similar to this, but it didn\'t seem to answer my question.

My question is this: why am I getting back this error

Answer 1

UNIONs (UNION and UNION ALL) require that all the queries being UNION'd have:

1. The same number of columns in the SELECT clause
2. The column data type has to match at each position

Your query has:

SELECT f.*, u1.*, u2.* ...
UNION 
SELECT fid2 FROM friends

The easiest re-write I have is:

   SELECT f.*, u.*
     FROM FRIENDS AS f
     JOIN USERS AS u ON u.uid = f.fid2
    WHERE f.fid1 = 1 
      AND f.fid2 > 1
UNION 
   SELECT f.*, u.*
     FROM FRIENDS AS f
     JOIN USERS AS u ON u.uid = f.fid1
    WHERE f.fid2  = 1 
      AND f.fid1 < 1
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 6;

You've LEFT JOIN'd to the USERS table twice, but don't appear to be using the information.