Re: sort Table for pairs

[Peter Brawley]

The table is not well designed for the query you want. Is there even a primary key?

Yes, one solution would indeed be to suck the table into PHP and create the desired result by manipulating the arrays in PHP.

In SQL, the pairs who had conversations are ...

select distinct abs as a, emp as b from msgs
union
select distinct emp as a, abs as b from msgs

... so their conversations are ...

select abs, emp, content, date from messages m
join (
  select distinct abs as a, emp as b from messages
  union
  select distinct emp as a, abs as b from messages
) p on (abs=a and emp=b) or (abs=b and emp-a)
order by a,b,date;