this is a problem i've been struggling with for a little while. any attempt to find help online has not produced any useful information. this is regarding joins, which i'm not an expert in, but hopefully one of you can help me out. i have an table 'articles' which has multiple fields, such as author, editor, photographer, etc.. each of these fields contains an index number which relates to another table 'people' that lists everyone. basically i just want to select everything with the names displaying, instead of id numbers. the way i'm currently doing this is pretty inefficient; on the display page, i have multiple queries. first to extract everything from the articles table, and then a query for each field (i.e. SELECT name FROM authors WHERE (author_id = $id). This works, although I'm pretty sure there's a much more efficient way of doing this with one query. I know a method would be to have separate tables for authors, editors, photographers, etc... but in this case, it would be simpler to just relate everything to the one "people" table. THis is because any particular person could take on multiple tasks, or different ones, for different articles. Hope this all makes sense. I have a feeling aliases will be need to used, although I'm not exactly sure how. Thanks for any help you guys might be able to provide. ;-) -jon -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
