subquery, temp table, and duplicates, help

[etux]

Hi y'all

I'm sure there's an easy solution to this, but just haven't got "it". I've got a table of authors, and a table of articles across three tables. Lots of authors to an article, and lots of articles to an author. No problem there, but i haven't been able to write a query statement that will return the authors to an article (where the articles are determined by the user), and the title, etc. without ending up with duplication i don't want. Wanted to use a subquery, but the server doesn't support subqueries (as far as i know), and thought of using temp tables, but i think i still end up with duplication, where every author in the list has a title to the name. Thought of denormalizing, but not sure that's the way to go. Thought also of using php to help out, but wanted to check here first. The tables and relationships were developed in access using a parent-child relationship in a form, but don't know how to do the same thing in mysql. I'd list specifics, but this seems to be a conceptual problem, not a technical one. Sorry, i'm a newbie at both php and mysql, and i've tried looking everyelse, but haven't come up with much (or i don't see it).

Appreciate any help i might get on this.

[ultraslacker]

I don't know what you mean by duplication.

Here's how I would do it -

author
author_id
author_name

article
article_id
article_name

article_author
author_id
article_id

SELECT author_name, article_name
FROM author au, article ar, article_author aa
WHERE au.author_id = aa.author_id AND aa.article_id = ar.article_id

[etux]

thanks ultraslacker,

Wanted to be sure that i was on the right track. The part about duplicates referred to the article title that comes up beside each contributing author - which is identical for each contributing author. With the subquery, i thought i'd be able to catch all the contributing authors, and have the title of the article appear once. (like a subform in access).

cheers.

[ultraslacker]

Repeating columns are normal for joins.

You are on the right track - use php to put the data into a presentable form.