Question

I have 2 tables: users and items. Each item has a user#. So, if I want to find only items associated with a particular user I can:

SELECT * FROM items WHERE user_id = “$user_id”;

But if there are thousands of items, searching through the table will take forever, right?

Is there a better way to go about doing this? Maybe a way to store all item numbers associated with a user into a field in the users table?

Thanks,
Jason

Answer 1

No, it won’t take forever. This is how it should be done, even if there were millions of records.

I noticed you quoted the user_id value… Isn’t it a number field? The quotes are not needed.

Obviously the user_id should be an indexed field.