hi, you could do this with a join, but i experienced single querys to be faster if you always have only one person_id to look for in person. if it was many person_ids and your query would end like "...person_id in (1,2,3...., 9998)" a join would by faster, I guess. feal free to correct me, if I'm wrong :-) btw: a join could look like this: SELECT * FROM article AS a LEFT JOIN person AS p1 ON a.author_id=p1.person_id LEFT JOIN person AS p2 ON a.editor_id=p2.person_id LEFT JO...... So with saving time() befor and after the query(s) you can do your own benchmarking.... regards, Bastain Jonathan Narong schrieb: > 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
