Question

I’m setting up a system that tracks daily challenges for a video game. There are 4 daily challenges and one weekly challenge. Each challenge gets saved to a table with an id, which can be reused it the challenge is ever reused (which they are, about 22% of the time). I’ve got another table to store each day’s challenges, it looks like this:

date | daily1 | daily2 | daily3 | daily4 | expiration

Since challenges are reused, I’d like to be able to look up other days on which a challenge was used, by its ID. I’m using this query right now:

SELECT date FROM `current_daily`
  WHERE daily1 = #
    OR daily2 = #
    OR daily3 = #
    OR daily4 = #
  ORDER BY date ASC

It works, but it’s so clunky. I’m trying to find a better was to run this query so I don’t need all the ORs, but since it’s getting information from multiple columns, it doesn’t look like I can use IN(). Is there another way I could simplify this query and still get the same information?

Answer 1

You could use an IN to clean this up, but don’t expect any performance gains from doing so.

SELECT date 
    FROM `current_daily`
    WHERE # IN (daily1, daily2, daily3, daily4)
    ORDER BY date ASC