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I am writing a PHP/MySQL program and I would like to know how to search across multiple tables using MySQL.
Basically, I have a search box as in the top right of most sites, and when user’s search something in that box, it needs to search in users.username, users.profile_text, uploads.title, uploads.description, sets.description and comments.text. I need to get the ID (stored in a id field in each table) and if possible, a google like excerpt.
You can either write your procedure to query each of these tables individually, or you could create a relatively simple view that conglomerates all of the searchable columns of the important tables along with an indicator showing which table they’re from. There’s not really a magic way to search multiple tables other than writing the statements normally.
The second approach would look something like this:
Then search on the resulting view. It’s important to note that this method won’t be fast.
A similar, and faster, alternative would be to dedicate a table to this task instead of a view, and populate it on insert/update/delete of the real tables instead of recomputing it on access.