Question

I have a table of dictionary terms and now I would like to create another table which would hold ID of the ‘main’ term and ID of related terms that have the ‘main’ term’s Name included in their Definition –

table: terms 
| id | name | definition |


Table: related 
| term_id | related_term_id |

It was pretty easy to create INSERT statements in PHP:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM terms");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $name = $row['name'];
    $result2 = mysql_query("SELECT id,name FROM terms WHERE description LIKE \"%$name%\" AND id!=".$row['id']);

    while ($row2 = mysql_fetch_array($result2)) {
        echo "INSERT INTO related(term_id,related_term_id) VALUES(".$row['id'].",".$row2['id'].");";
    }
}

However, as I don’t have too much experience with MySQL I was wondering if that can be done purely in SQL – let say with use of INSERT-SELECT statement?

Thanks!

Answer 1

INSERT INTO related (term_id, related_term_id)
SELECT a.id as term_id, b.id AS related_term_id
FROM terms a, terms b
WHERE a.id != b.id
AND b.description LIKE CONCAT('%', b.name, '%')