 <p>You're looking for an outer join. This variant of your first query should do the trick:</p> <pre><code>SELECT DISTINCT ent.Entity_Id, ent.Profile_Pic_Url, ent.First_Name, ent.Last_Name, ent.Last_CheckIn_Place, comments.Content, friends.Category FROM checkin_comments AS comments JOIN entity AS ent ON comments.Entity_Id = ent.Entity_Id LEFT JOIN friends ON comments.Entity_Id = friends.Entity_Id1 OR comments.Entity_Id = friends.Entity_Id2 WHERE comments.Chk_Id = 1726 AND IFNULL(friends.Category, 0) != 4 GROUP BY comments.Comment_Id </code></pre> <p>In the event that the comment author is not associated with the requester via the <code>friends</code> table, the comment will be included in the join result, with all columns derived from <code>friends</code> being <code>NULL</code>. The <code>IFNULL()</code> in the <code>WHERE</code> clause deals with that by converting a <code>NULL</code> category to value <code>0</code> (though in fact any value other than <code>4</code> would work).</p>