I apologize for the poorly worded question. It's best illustrated through an example and what I've come up with so far:

Table "myInfo" has columns: 

```
1. id (PK) 
2. key 
3. value 
4. metaId 

```

Table "meta" has columns: 

```
1. id (PK) 
2. metaName 
3. metaValue 
4. instanceNum 

```

metaId in the "myInfo" table correlates to a instanceNum in the "meta" table. The value of the "value" column changes sometimes over different rows with the metaId. Think of the metaId as a link to a timestamp value in the "meta" table("timestamp" and its value would go into the metaName and metaValue columns respectively). 

I want to select the distinct values of the 'value' column in "myInfo". So far I have: 

```sql
SELECT DISTINCT mi.key, mi.value 
  FROM myInfo as mi JOIN metadata as meta 
 WHERE mi.metaId=meta.instanceNum 
   AND meta.key = 'timestamp' 
   AND mi.key='maxWeight'; 

```

But I ALSO want the timestamps associated with those values. So I want the output to look something like: 

```

key       value   timestamp 
maxWeight 10 tons 15:00:05 2011-01-01 
maxWeight 5 tons  08:00:07 2011-10-12 
maxWeight 25 tons 13:05:09 2013-08-01 

```

I can't place timestamp as one of the columns in my SELECT because then it will return duplicate mi.attrValue values too since the timestamp makes every row unique. I tried putting the DISTINCT keyword behind only mi.attrValue but I got a MySQL error.