Displaying text from mulitple left joins

[cretaceous]

I have a job search where people can have many different JOINS.
So a person could have professional qualifications, employment history, education history, references etc and each is held in its own table connected via left joins.
The search obviously returns multiple duplicated rows and right now I'm cleaning it up by putting it into a PHP array piece by piece.

Is there a better strategy for doing this in the SQL, like using SUB SELECTS?
The array method feels messy and I'm not sure where to start looking.
Thanks!

[NogDog]

Hard for me to say without a clearer understanding, but one thought is to consider breaking things up into multiple queries if that helps to clean things up. X number of smaller queries are not necessarily going to take (significantly) more processing time than one complex query that tries to do everything at once; and if it saves having to do extra processing time in the PHP code to organize the results of one big query....

[cretaceous]

Thanks Nogdog - I guess it can stay as the PHP sort routine. It's only for single selects not long lists of members. Just need a sanity check every now and then!

[NogDog]

Depending on the DBMS, perhaps, you could conceivably use sub-queries in the select list to put matches into a delimited list that you could then simply explode() in PHP.

[dalecosp]

NogDog;11056553 wrote:

Depending on the DBMS, perhaps, you could conceivably use sub-queries

For one specific instance, MySQL (historically & notably) doesn't perform subqueries too quickly ...

[NogDog]

Good thing we use PostgreSQL then. 🙂