Once you understand the logic of joins the rest is pretty straightforward, since in terms of execution the sequence in which you do the joins is irrelevant. (Performance is another issue, quickly resolved by specifying the smallest tables first.)
Supposing that you have tables Products, Suppliers and Categories, which Products having foreign keys referencing Suppliers and Categories... SELECT ProductID, ProductName, SupplierID, SupplierName, CategoryID, CategoryName FROM Products INNER JOIN Suppliers ON Products.SupplierID = Suppliers.SupplierID INNER JOIN Categories ON Products.CategoryID = Categories.CategoryID; You can just keep building up such a query according to the number of tables you need to drag into the operation. Given the above query, you may well want to change the order of table references, but that doesn't intrude upon the logic and unless you have a very large number of rows in one or more tables, the performance difference will barely be noticeable. There are several GUI tools that let you perform multi-table selects using drag-and-drop techniques (c.f. DBTools, IMO one of the finest, with the added benefit that it remembers relatinships that you declare within it). Then you can inspect the code it writes and tweak it to suit using EXPLAIN. hth, Arthur ----- Original Message ----- From: "damovand" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "mysql" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2002 12:31 PM Subject: Is there Examples and Documents on joining tables? > Is there a document that compiles examples on different ways of joining > two or more tables? I found a few on > http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/JOIN.html but they do not cover joining more > than two tables. > > Thanks for any suggestions. > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Before posting, please check: > http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) > http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) > > To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
