Re: Handling many one-to-many relationships

[Peter Brawley]

Simon,

Joins look intimidating till you've written a few dozen. It'll help to work through a few join tutorials.

And there are many reasons why explicit join syntax ...

SELECT ...
FROM t1

JOIN t2 ON t1.id=t2.t1id

JOIN t3 ON t2.id=t3.t2id

JOIN t4 ON t3.id=t4.t3id
WHERE ...

is to be preferred over the comma join syntax suggested by FJ:
it is easier to understand,
it is easier to maintain,
it succeeds where comma joins crash (see the manual page for joins),
it logically separates restrictions (Where clause) from virtual tables (Joins),
it easily distinguishes outer (eg left) and inner joins
it simplifies replacing unbearably slow Where [Not] Exists subqueries with an exclusion join.

PB