Question

I’m dealing with a relational table and I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to lower the number of queries I need to make when inserting data to the tables..

Here are the queries I currently use:

I insert the “main” values.

INSERT INTO products
        (title, description, status, url)
    VALUES
        ('some title', 'description of doom', 1, 'some-title'); 

We make it insert the value only if it doesn’t exist already.

    INSERT IGNORE INTO values
            (value)
        VALUES
            ('example value');  

Since I’m not sure if the query was actually inserted, I get the id..

            SELECT id
                FROM
                    values
                WHERE
                    value = 'example value'; 

Where “?” is the ID I got from the last query.

                INSERT INTO link
                        ( id_product, id_catalog, id_value )
                    VALUES
                        ( 33, 1, ? );

This means that each extra value I need to add will cost 3 queries. So my question is: Is there a more efficient way to do this?

Answer 1

You can do this to at least drop one of the queries:

INSERT INTO link
     ( id_product, id_catalog, id_value )
VALUES
     ( 33, 1, (SELECT id
                 FROM values
                WHERE value = 'example value') );

I basically am replacing the ‘?’ with a sub select of the second query to get the id.