Re: many to many relationships and PHP

[Scotty Miller]

If I read that right, that is the ideal solution. I've experienced several situations where the slow-down is on the web server and not the database. Properly indexing your fields is key in this. I actually did a case study the other week for some others to show them what happens in an improperly indexed table containing 50,000 rows in several tables, and linking them together, I went from 1 min and 30-45 second queries down to .045 second queries by properly indexing the fields.

It is more or less preference over how data is handled, but I like to live by the idea that I want MySQL to do as much of the work as possible, leaving little to no parsing and manipulation of data on the web server, and condensing multiple queries into one where possible. Worst case scenario I've ever seen was where I had to tell the boss that I am physically limited to 61 joins in one query, no more, sorry! I still haven't forgiven her for that...