Joining mulitple tables - MySQL

[Anon]

I have a table with 10 columns, each of these id numbers relating to a name in another field.

What i would like to do is join another table containg all the names, to each of the 10 columns in the first table.

So basically i am trying to join the same table to 10 fields.

Is there an easy way to do this?

Table 1

LinkID CatID1 CatID2 CatID3 CatID4 etc

Table 2

CatID Name

[Anon]

Hi,
use aliases in your query and reference multiple instances of Table2 : f.e.

SELECT Table1.LinkID,Cat1.Name,Cat2.Name,Cat3.Name,...
FROM Table1,Table2 Cat1,Table2 Cat2, Table2 Cat3,...
WHERE Table1.CatID1=Cat1.CatID AND Table1.CatID2=Cat2.CatID AND Table1.CatID3=Cat3.CatID ...

The problem with this query is, that this query is only functional in the case of the existence of all 10 entries of Table1.
For these are OUTER-Joins the right choices,but this would be much complex.

Instead make an default-entry in Table2, f.e.:
CatID 0, Name "not assigned" or "-"

The default value for the CatIDs in Table1 should be 0 then, to guarantee referential integrity.

Alternative:
To be more flexible normalize the Table1 into multiple rows with one row per CatID and Link.

Regards
Ingo