Struggling with mysql join!

dazzling

Hi all,

First let me say how great these boards are. They have answered nearly all of my queries whilst i have been developing a site over the past 4 months. I would like to think as a result i have gone from a PHP newbie to a PHP veteran!

However, i am struggling using mysql joins (since probably suprisingly i have never needed to use them before). I will try to get to the point as quickly as possible.

I am importing xml data into 2 tables (each has an identical structure), the first table contains data that is found in another table of known products and the second table contains all other product data that is unknown i.e. not match with known data table.

I simply want to run an sql query that gets data from both tables when a criteria is met and store in one array i.e.

when i get results from one table only it is a simple:

SELECT * FROM t_awdatafeed where CatName='Digital Cameras'

I have a degree of understanding of how joins work but I cannot find any examples for my case and all attempts to date have failed.

Can anyone help??

Cheers

Darren

Lars_Berg

SELECT * FROM t_awdatafeed where CatName='Digital Cameras'
union all
SELECT * FROM t_whatever where CatName='Digital Cameras'

Rather than having two identical tables you should use one table with an additional column to distinguish between known and unknown products.

dazzling

Thanks for that...will dash off to test in moment. The Reason for the seperate tables is that at present the number of rows is over 40,000 with only approx. 3000 products in the knowntable

Despite my best efforts to index correctly i found that as most searches are text searchs they were releatively slow as they were searching through the many of remaining 37,000 products which do not need searching through. Worst still since the 2 tables are deleted and repopulated each day i could not use numeric IDs for products.

My original setup was a single table with column 'product_known' and a simple 1 or 0 value.