When retrieving data, there times where you may want to change the WHERE clause in WordPress. That is, depending on what you’re retrieving, you may want to filter what it’s searching.

A favorite, but It’s not that kind of filter.

And that’s exactly what a WHERE clause does. But just as we’ve looked at content in other posts, we can alter the WHERE clause via the WordPress API.

In previous posts, I’ve covered:

• Displaying the last query, which is useful when doing light debugging.
• Selecting `DISTINCT` records
• Performing a `JOIN` on two tables

Here, I’ll show how to use the API to change the WHERE clause so you’re not having to do so through a custom query.

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In a previous posts, I’ve talked about how to:

• View the last query that WordPress executed
• Select `DISTINCT` records in WordPress

There’s a lot more to do than just viewing the last query and selecting distinct rows, though. For example, you can also JOIN two tables in WordPress without having to write raw SQL.

So to be consistent with some of the previous posts, I thought I’d share how to do this using the WordPress API .

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If you need to write a query against the WordPress database, grab a reference to $wpdb and get to work, right?

In some instances, sure. I’m not opposed to this. After all, the API exists for a reason. But sometimes, I think we bypass built-in APIs. We go straight for $wpdb without looking to see if other hooks already exist.

If a hook exists, why not use it? It’s one level of abstraction above the database and it uses the native API.

As mentioned in a previous post, I want to cover a few ways to customize queries that run against the database.

Case in point: selecting DISTINCT records from WordPress. Continue reading