Question

I have a table called Articles. I also have a table for Tags. The tags table actually has 2 separate tables as its a many-to-many relationship between Articles and Tags. For example:

CREATE TABLE Articles (
    id INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT
    title VARCHAR(255),
    author INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    body TEXT NOT NULL -- column type may not be representative
) Engine=InnoDB;

CREATE TABLE Tags (
    id INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    name VARCHAR(32)
) Engine=InnoDB;

CREATE TABLE Article_Tags (
    article INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    tag INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    FOREIGN KEY (article) REFERENCES Articles (id),
    FOREIGN KEY (tag) REFERENCES Tags (id)
) Engine=InnoDB;

Now, is it possible to do a single query to return an article, and also all the tags related to that article from the Tags table in the same query?

Answer 1

As per comments, you typically use a JOIN statement to combine related records from multiple tables.

Note that I assume that

• Articles has an ID column
• Article_Tags has an ArticleID and TagID column
• Tags has an ID column

If the actual column names differ, you should replace the corresponding columns in my statement with their actual names.

SQL Statement

SELECT *
FROM   Articles a
       INNER JOIN Article_Tags at ON at.ArticleID = a.ID
       INNER JOIN Tags t ON t.ID = at.TagID

More information about the JOIN syntax

SQL joins are used to query data from two or more tables, based on a
relationship between certain columns in these tables