Hi All, I have a partial table structure as below
tbl_user_main user_id pk user_level references tbl_level user_class references tbl_class user_level references tbl_level tbl_level level_id pk level_name level_points tbl_weapon weapon_id pk weapon_name weapon_level references tbl_level weapon_class references tbl_class weapon_alignment references tbl_alignment weapon_cost tbl_class class_id pk class_name tbl_alignment alignment_id pk alignment_name tbl_user_weapon user_id references tbl_user weapon_id references tbl_weapon I want to know how many weapons a given user has of a particular class or alignment where the level of the weapons are equal or less than the players own level. For this I have developed the following SQL: 1 | select alignment.alignment as alignment, count(distinct(weapon.weapon_name)) as count from 2 | ( select * from tbl_alignment where alignment_id != 1 ) alignment, 3 | ( select * from tbl_weapon) weapon, 4 | ( select * from tbl_user_main where user_id = $user_id ) person 5 | where weapon.weapon_id IN ( 6 | select u.weapon_id 7 | from tbl_weapon u 8 | where u.weapon_level <= person.user_level 9 | and u.cost = 0 10| or u.weapon_id IN ( 11| select uu.weapon_id 12| from tbl_user_weapon uu 13| where uu.user_id = person.user_id 14| ) 15| ) 16| and alignment.alignment_id = weapon.weapon_alignment 17| group by alignment.alignment 18| order by alignment.alignment ASC; To clarify lines 5 through 15 - a weapon can be free or cost some amount. To track users that have bought a weapon there is the tbl_user_weapon table. Every purchase gets listed in there. The count must take into account all free weapons and weapons which the user has purchased. At the moment there are some 300 weapons. In the case above the "alignment" with id 1 is a catchall so I disregard it. $user_id can be any user_id from tbl_user_main. The result of a query such as this is along the lines of; alignment | count ----------+------- Shadow | 4 Heavenly | 6 This takes a long time to complete - circa 3 seconds. Which is fine when run one off - but it appears in a section of a website that will potentially be accessed a lot and I can see it causing a few issues in terms of table/row locking as the game app uses these tables a lot. ideally I need it to run a lot quicker. Can anyone see any ways to speed this up? I have considered views but these seem to just be a way of aliasing a query as opposed to the materialised views present in other RDBMS's. Short of creating another 3rd form table that has user_id | alignment_id | count Which would get updated upon each weapon purchase I cannot see a low overhead way of getting the data. Creating a table such as this would need to be a last resort as its maintenance will quickly become a headache due to the number of purchase routes in the project. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks, ------------------------------ Michael Ossareh (Mē) Technical Manager 12snap UK Ltd ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org