Pierre Thibaudeau wrote:
I have a PERSONS table.
I also have a PROGENY table, which is a many-to-many association table
with two foreign keys to the PERSONS table to itself.
(In this day and age, not only can an individual have any number of
children, but also a person can have any number of parents!  At least,
let's assume that's true for the sake of this setup.)

Suppose I wish to construct a view of the persons, along with the name
of their first-born (if they have one;  NULL otherwise).  The
following SELECT does just that:

SELECT
        persons.*,
        (
                SELECT child.name
                FROM progeny JOIN persons child ON child.id = progeny.child
                WHERE progeny.parent = persons.id
                ORDER BY child.birthdate ASC
                LIMIT 1
        ) AS firstborn_name
 FROM persons;

Now, this is probably not the most elegant piece of code, but the real
problem is that
I cannot see how to extend it to the case where I want not only the
firstborn's name but also the firstborn's ID
(short of repeating the entire subselect a second time).  At the
moment, with this current syntax, my subSELECT statement would not be
allowed to return more than a single column.

Any suggestion?

Would this work?

select
   p.*
  ,pp.*
from
   persons p
  ,(
       SELECT child.name, child.id
       FROM progeny JOIN persons child ON child.id = progeny.child
       WHERE progeny.parent = p.id
       ORDER BY child.birthdate ASC
       LIMIT 1
   ) as kid(kid_name,kid_id)

best regards,
Marcus

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