Left Join With Where Clause

Question

The where clause is filtering away rows where the left join doesn't succeed. Move it to the join:

SELECT  `settings`.*, `character_settings`.`value`
FROM    `settings`
LEFT JOIN 
       `character_settings` 
ON     `character_settings`.`setting_id` = `settings`.`id`
        AND `character_settings`.`character_id` = '1'  

When making OUTER JOINs (ANSI-89 or ANSI-92), filtration location matters because criteria specified in the ON clause is applied before the JOIN is made. Criteria against an OUTER JOINed table provided in the WHERE clause is applied after the JOIN is made. This can produce very different result sets. In comparison, it doesn't matter for INNER JOINs if the criteria is provided in the ON or WHERE clauses -- the result will be the same.

  SELECT  s.*, 
          cs.`value`
     FROM SETTINGS s
LEFT JOIN CHARACTER_SETTINGS cs ON cs.setting_id = s.id
                               AND cs.character_id = 1

If I understand your question correctly you want records from the settings database if they don't have a join accross to the character_settings table or if that joined record has character_id = 1.

You should therefore do

SELECT `settings`.*, `character_settings`.`value`
FROM (`settings`)
LEFT OUTER JOIN `character_settings` 
ON `character_settings`.`setting_id` = `settings`.`id`
WHERE `character_settings`.`character_id` = '1' OR
`character_settings`.character_id is NULL

You might find it easier to understand by using a simple subquery

SELECT `settings`.*, (
    SELECT `value` FROM `character_settings`
    WHERE `character_settings`.`setting_id` = `settings`.`id`
      AND `character_settings`.`character_id` = '1') AS cv_value
FROM `settings`

The subquery is allowed to return null, so you don't have to worry about JOIN/WHERE in the main query.

Sometimes, this works faster in MySQL, but compare it against the LEFT JOIN form to see what works best for you.

SELECT s.*, c.value
FROM settings s
LEFT JOIN character_settings c ON c.setting_id = s.id AND c.character_id = '1'

For this problem, as for many others involving non-trivial left joins such as left-joining on inner-joined tables, I find it convenient and somewhat more readable to split the query with a with clause. In your example,

with settings_for_char as (
  select setting_id, value from character_settings where character_id = 1
)
select
  settings.*,
  settings_for_char.value
from
  settings
  left join settings_for_char on settings_for_char.setting_id = settings.id;