Question

It took a while to come up with a title as I wasn’t sure what to title it. Basically my problem deals with SQL queries and coming up with an efficient method to go about what I am trying to do.

To give it in an example, say we have two tables:

Table 1 (Articles): ID | ArticleName | AuthorID
Table 2 (Users):    ID | AuthorName

What I am attempting to do is pull, say the last 5 articles. From here, with each article it pulls it has a while loop to query the second table to pull AuthorName where ID=AuthorID.

In essence, we have one query for the 5 articles and then another five queries to get the author names. This is further compounded on pages with 10-20 or more articles, where there’s an extra 10-20+ queries.

Is there a more efficient method to join these statements together and have it pull the AuthorName for each article it pulls?

The reason for using AuthorID in table 1 is so that if usernames are changed, it doesn’t break anything. Along with this, it (as far as I understand) cuts down a lot on the database storage.

I’m still somewhat new to SQL though so any ideas on how to resolve this would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance, and if there are any questions please don’t hesitate to ask!

Answer 1

SELECT * FROM `Articles` INNER JOIN `Users` ON `Articles`.`AuthorID`=`Users`.`ID`