need a single MYSQL Query for this?

[Tea_J]

How do i properly build an 'efficient' query for this simple situation??

Im trying to output the last 5 threads of a message board. The output data will be:

Thread title,
forum name (from what forum it came from )
poster (the user who started the thread )

This would involve 2 tables:

topics and forums

.. where the topics table contain the topic title , the thread starter and the FORUM ID.

and ofcourse I will have to pull out the forum name from the Forums table using the forum_id in the topics table

I could build a query for the topics such as:

SELECT title, forum_id, poster FROM topics ORDER BY start_date DESC LIMIT 5

...and then build another query for the forum name for each of the result like this

SELECT forum_name FROM forums WHERE forum_id ='$forum_id'

The above would surely work but i wanted to know if there is a more efficient way to doing this? I was thinking of joining tables, but I CANT SEEM TO FIGURE OUT THE RIGHT FORMULA.. coz, there is no "WHERE" clause like a normal table join operation would have.

Any ideas?

[Pig]

If you are using standard forum software it would involve 3 tables: user, thread, post (don't know what the names are in your software).

You need to left join the other tables onto the post table. Read the manual about left joins.