Pushing the envelop with nested WHILE loops

[brucec]

Just curious. How deep are your while loops when performing things like MySQL queries.

I just had 3 nested loops today. I am sure some people out there have done a lot more than that. I am curious what people have done.

I usually average 2, but because of the database developers at Microsoft's BCentral don't know how to, well, develop a database, my boss wanted a report which I think should be available at BCentral.

So, I downloaded a comma delimited file, imported it into MyPHPAdmin and then write a triple nested WHILE loop all doing MySQL queries.

I am happy to say that the report works great when you use it with CSS.

[swr]

You didn't mention anything about the layout of the data. Could you use a SQL join to get the database to handle the extra logic? Usually (but not always) you can, and it is usually (but not always) faster than implementing the logic in the web server.

I rarely need more than one, and when I do they are almost never nested.

[brucec]

Good question. I used CSS for the layout and it formatted the layout very well.

Yes, I use table joins all the time, but table joins return only one set of data. I supposed I could have used a UNION select.

My report uses 3 different sets of data and I used Table joins in two of them. I did not use a mega table join because I needed to manipulate the data freely.

Keep in mind that my tables are normalized and related pretty well.