How to avoid to do 100 queries in this case? - php

I have created a simple blog in php/mysql that show in homepage latest 100 posts and for every post show the comments's number.
This is the pseudocode:
Mysql query to get latest 100 posts.
While cicle:
Get title and body of each post.
Mysql query to get the comments's number of the post.
Database structure:
Post:
-id
-title
-body
-date
Comments:
-id
-id_post
-id_user
-body
-date
Is there a way to avoid 100 queries ?

It's a fairly straightforward query:
SELECT p.id, p.title, p.body. p.date, COUNT(c.id) AS comment_count
FROM Post p
LEFT JOIN Comments c ON p.id=c.id_post
GROUP BY p.id, p.title, p.body. p.date
ORDER BY p.id DESC
LIMIT 100
(Please note it's untested, take it as a starting point.)
I know it's a common believe that a database is nothing but a fancy file system and SELECT * FROM data is all the SQL you'll ever need to know but investing some time in learning basic SQL it's absolutely worth the effort.

You can write a sql query that JOINS both of your tables together, to return all of the information you want:
SELECT
p.id,
p.title,
p.body,
p.date,
COUNT(c.id)
FROM Post p
LEFT JOIN Comments c ON p.id = C.post_id
GROUP BY p.id, p.title, p.body, p.date
ORDER BY p.date DESC
LIMIT 100
Jeff Atwood has a great visual guide explaining how joins work.
We are effectively selecting the top 100 posts in date order, counting the total comments (if they exist - that's why we use a LEFT JOIN as otherwise, if we use an INNER JOIN, we will ONLY return posts that have comments).
We GROUP BY as that's how COUNT (and other aggregation functions like SUM and AVG work - we need to tell them what the rule is for counting/summing/averaging our rows.
We ORDER BY the post date, in DESCending order (latest first) to ensure we return posts in the order they were made.
The LIMIT 100 statement only returns the first 100 rows in MySql. Change it to any number you wish (a top 10, 50 etc) if you want to vary the number of posts in the summary.
The overall result is that you now have a result set that contains the post information, and the number of comments, all in one query. You can then display these results in your web application any way you see fit.

Just join your tables and then count the number of comments for that post.
SELECT p.id, p.title, p.body, COUNT(pc.id) as comments
FROM Post p
LEFT JOIN Comments pc ON (p.id = pc.id_post)
GROUP BY pc.id_post LIMIT 100
Hope that is what you are after.

Join your posts table with your posts-info tables, and select them at the same time
select p.id,pi.comments from posts as p, post_info as pi where p.id == pi.id
or something like that.
EDIT:
select p.title,p.body,p.date,count(c.id) from post as p, comments as c where p.id == c.id_post
I believe.

Related

Left join and count in same query return incorrect result

The problem is that if there is 0 comment or 1 comment the count shows 1 while the rest is working well means that 2, 3, etc working fine.
$sql = "SELECT blog.*,count(blog.id) as Total FROM blog left JOIN comment on comment.id = blog.id GROUP BY date desc";
Your query should look like this:
SELECT b.date, count(c.id) as Total
FROM blog b LEFT JOIN
comment c
ON c.id = b.id
GROUP BY b.date DESC;
This assumes that date comes from blog (which should be the case if your current query is working). The difference is that you are counting from the second table, not the first.
This does not use * for columns from blog. That is usually a very, very bad idea when using GROUP BY. The best practice (enforced by almost all SQL engines) is to only include unaggregated columns in the SELECT when they are in the GROUP BY.
Note: It seems very awkward that the same column id is used for the JOIN between two very different entities (blogs and comments).
i just change to count(comment.id) from count(blog.id)

MYSQL Join help. Get results based on number of comments in seperate comments table?

Beginner here! I am trying to write a query that will select the 3 most commented on results from a "results" table the comments are stored in a seperate "comments" table.
results
- id
- title
- body
- etc
- etc
comments
- id
- result_id
- user_id
- timestamp
- comment
So I need to select all from results and order by the amount of matches between results.id and comments.result_id but I don't really know where to start!
Thanks a lot for the help, it's much appreciated!
Not tested but you can do something like that
SELECT r.id ,r.title, r.body
FROM results r INNER JOIN (SELECT result_id, count(id) cnt FROM comments GROUP BY result_id) c
ON r.id = c.result_id
ORDER by c.cnt DESC
Perhaps try something like this:
SELECT COUNT(c.id) AS comment_count FROM results r
LEFT JOIN comments c ON r.id=c.result_id
GROUP BY result_id ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 3;
The following should work:
SELECT r.id, COUNT(r.id) AS comment_count
FROM results r
INNER JOIN comments c
ON results.id = c.result_id
GROUP BY r.id
ORDER BY comment_count DESC
You join the two tables where the id of the result is the same as the referenced result_id from the comments table. Then you group the rows by result_id to remove duplicates. The COUNT() function sums up the grouped rows and displays the number of them.
Then just sort the result based on the generated comment count.
You could use LEFT OUTER JOIN as well, then you would get all results that have no comments as well. If you want this or not depends on your needs.
For a description of SQL joins, check out What is the difference between "INNER JOIN" and "OUTER JOIN"?

Sorting a MySQL query based on another query?

I'm building some very simple forum software as a sort of self-test for my PHP and MySQL skills, but I'm not quite sure how to accomplish this task. I have a table called Threads which contains a list of all threads. I also have a table called Posts, which contains all posts. Each table's primary key is an auto-increment ID. Each row in Posts also contains the ID of the thread it belongs to.
While I can easily retrieve all of the threads in a certain subforum with a query like this:
SELECT * FROM Threads WHERE ForumID='$forumid'
...I'm not sure how to sort that based on the latest post from each thread. I can get the posts for any given thread like this:
SELECT * FROM Posts WHERE ThreadID='$threadid'
...but I don't know how to incorporate that data into my initial query to sort it. Since each post has a unique ID, posts with higher IDs will always be more recent, so there's no need to compare dates or anything like that. I'm just unclear on how to actually do the query.
I'm pretty sure that this is possible in just MySQL, but if it's not, what would be the most efficient PHP solution? Thanks!
Try this with INNER JOIN
SELECT p.*,t.*
FROM Threads t
INNER JOIN Posts p ON t.id = p.ThreadID
ORDER BY
//whatever column you want like this p.date
p.date
DESC
Thomething like this can helps you
SELECT DISTINCT t.* FROM Posts p LEFT JOIN Threads t ON p.ThreadID = t.id ORDER BY p.last_modified_time DESC
Or
SELECT DISTINCT t.* FROM Posts p LEFT JOIN Threads t ON p.ThreadID = t.id ORDER BY p.id DESC
A simple JOIN statement is the solution:
SELECT *
FROM Threads t
JOIN Posts p ON t.ThreadID = p.ThreadID
ORDER BY t.ModificationDate DESC -- or whatever column you want
This gives you the latest posts over all threads.
All of the given answers were very close, but I ended up using the following query:
SELECT t.*
FROM Threads t
INNER JOIN Posts p ON t.id = p.threadId
GROUP BY t.id
ORDER BY MAX(p.id) DESC
This is due to DUPLICATE causing problems due to its auto-grouping. See this answer for more info on the topic.

mysql/php: show posts and for each post all comments

I know this question has been asked multiple times (however, I could still not find a solution):
PHP MYSQL showing posts with comments
mysql query - blog posts and comments with limit
mysql structure for posts and comments
...
Basic question: having tables posts, comments, user... can you with one single select statement select and show all posts and all comments (with comment.user, comment.text, comment.timestamp)? How would such a select statement look like? If not, what is the easiest solution?
I also tried to JOIN the comments table with the posts table and use GROUP BY, but I got either only one comment in each row or each comment but also those posts multiple times!?
I tried the solution of the first link (nested mysql_query and then fetch) as well as the second link (with arrays). However, the first caused a bunch of errors (the syntax in that post seems to be not correct and I could not figure out how to solve it) and in the second I had problems with the arrays.
My query looks like this till now:
SELECT p.id, p.title, p.text, u.username, c.country_name, (SELECT SUM(vote_type) FROM votes v WHERE v.post_id = p.id) AS sum_vote_type FROM posts p LEFT JOIN user u ON ( p.user_id = u.id ) LEFT JOIN countries c ON ( c.country_id = u.country_id ) ORDER BY $orderby DESC
I was wondering if this issue was not very common, having posts and comments to show...?
Thank you for every help in advance!
Not knowing your database structure, it should look something like this. Note that you should replace the * characters with more explicit lists of columns you actually need.
SELECT p.*, c.*, u.* FROM posts p
LEFT JOIN comments c ON c.post_id = p.id
LEFT JOIN users u ON u.id = p.author_id
Note that if you're just trying to get counts, sums and things like that it's a good idea to cache some of that information. For instance, you may want to cache the comment count in the post table instead of counting them every query. Only count and update the comment count when adding/removing a comment.
EDIT:
Realized that you also wanted to attach user data to each comment. You can JOIN the same table more than once but it gets ugly. This could turn into a really expensive query. I also am including an example of how to alias columns so it's less confusing:
SELECT p.*, c.*, u.name as post_author, u2.name as comment_author FROM posts p
LEFT JOIN comments c ON c.post_id = p.id
LEFT JOIN users u ON u.id = p.author_id
LEFT JOIN users u2 ON u2.id = c.author_id

Need help with a multiple table query in mysql

I'm working on building a forum with kohana. I know there is already good, free, forum software out there, but it's for a family site, so I thought I'd use it as a learning experience. I'm also not using the ORM that is built into Kohana, as I would like to learn more about SQL in the process of building the forum.
For my forum I have 4 main tables:
USERS
TOPICS
POSTS
COMMENTS
TOPICS table: id (auto incremented), topic row.
USERS table: username, email, first and last name and a few other non related rows
POSTS table: id (auto incremented), post-title, post-body, topic-id, user-id, post-date, updated-date, updated-by(which will contain the user-id of the person who made the most recent comment)
COMMENTS table: id (auto incremented), post-id, user-id and comment
On the main forum page I would like to have:
a list of all of the topics
the number of posts for each topic
the last updated post, and who updated it
the most recently updated topic to be on top, most likely an "ORDER BY updated-date"
Here is the query I have so far:
SELECT topics.id AS topic-id,
topics.topic,
post-user.id AS user-id,
CONCAT_WS(' ', post-user.first-name, post-user.last-name) AS name,
recent-post.id AS post-id,
post-num.post-total,
recent-post.title AS post-title,
recent-post.update_date AS updated-date,
recent-post.updated-by AS updated-by
FROM topics
JOIN (SELECT posts.topic-id,
COUNT(*) AS post-total
FROM POSTS
WHERE posts.topic-id = topic-id
GROUP BY posts.topic-id) AS post-num ON topics.id = post-num.topic-id
JOIN (SELECT posts.*
FROM posts
ORDER BY posts.update-date DESC) AS recent-post ON topics.id = recent-post.topic-id
JOIN (SELECT users.*,
posts.user-id
FROM users, posts
WHERE posts.user-id = users.id) as post-user ON recent-post.user_id = post-user.id
GROUP BY topics.id
This query almost works as it will get all of information for topics that have posts. But it doesn't return the topics that don't have any posts.
I'm sure that the query is inefficient and wrong since it makes two sub-selects to the posts table, but it was the only way I could get to the point I'm at.
Dash is not a valid character in SQL identifiers, but you can use "_" instead.
You don't necessarily have to get everything from a single SQL query. In fact, trying to do so makes it harder to code, and also sometimes makes it harder for the SQL optimizer to execute.
It makes no sense to use ORDER BY in a subquery.
Name your primary key columns topic_id, user_id, and so on (instead of "id" in every table), and you won't have to alias them in the select-list.
Here's how I would solve this:
First get the most recent post per topic, with associated user information:
SELECT t.topic_id, t.topic,
u.user_id, CONCAT_WS(' ', u.first_name, u.last_name) AS full_name,
p.post_id, p.title, p.update_date, p.updated_by
FROM topics t
INNER JOIN
(posts p INNER JOIN users u ON (p.updated_by = u.user_id))
ON (t.topic_id = p.topic_id)
LEFT OUTER JOIN posts p2
ON (p.topic_id = p2.topic_id AND p.update_date < p2.update_date)
WHERE p2.post_id IS NULL;
Then get the counts of posts per topic in a separate, simpler query.
SELECT t.topic_id, COUNT(*) AS post_total
FROM topics t LEFT OUTER JOIN posts p USING (topic_id)
GROUP BY t.topic_id;
Merge the two data sets in your application.
to ensure you get results for topics without posts, you'll need to use LEFT JOIN instead of JOIN for the first join between topics and the next table. LEFT JOIN means "always return a result set row for every row in the left table, even if there's no match with the right table."
Gotta go now, but I'll try to look at the efficiency issues later.
This is a very complicated query. You should note that JOIN statements will limit your topics to those that have posts. If a topic does not have a post, a JOIN statement will filter it out.
Try the following query.
SELECT *
FROM
(
SELECT T.Topic,
COUNT(AllTopicPosts.ID) NumberOfPosts,
MAX(IFNULL(MostRecentPost.Post-Title, '') MostRecentPostTitle,
MAX(IFNULL(MostRecentPostUser.UserName, '') MostRecentPostUser
MAX(IFNULL(MostRecentPost.Updated_Date, '') MostRecentPostDate
FROM TOPICS
LEFT JOIN POSTS AllTopicPosts ON AllTopicPosts.Topic_Id = TOPICS.ID
LEFT JOIN
(
SELECT *
FROM Posts P
WHERE P.Topic_id = TOPICS.id
ORDER BY P.Updated_Date DESC
LIMIT 1
) MostRecentPost ON MostRecentPost.Topic_Id = TOPICS.ID
LEFT JOIN USERS MostRecentPostUser ON MostRecentPostUser.ID = MostRecentPost.User_Id
GROUP BY T.Topic
)
ORDER BY MostRecentPostDate DESC
I'd use a left join inside a subquery to pull back the correct topic, and then you can do a little legwork outside of that to get some of the user info.
select
s.topic_id,
s.topic,
u.user_id as last_updated_by_id,
u.user_name as last_updated_by,
s.last_post,
s.post_count
from
(
select
t.id as topic_id,
t.topic,
t.user_id as orig_poster,
max(coalesce(p.post_date, t.post_date)) as last_post,
count(*) as post_count --would be p.post_id if you don't want to count the topic
from
topics t
left join posts p on
t.id = p.topic_id
group by
t.topic_id,
t.topic,
t.user_id
) s
left join posts p on
s.topic_id = p.topic_id
and s.last_post = p.post_date
and s.post_count > 1 --0 if you're using p.post_id up top
inner join users u on
u.id = coalesce(p.user_id, s.orig_poster)
order by
s.last_post desc
This query does introduce coalesce and left join, and they are very good concepts to look into. For two arguments (like used here), you can also use ifnull in MySQL, since it is functionally equivalent.
Keep in mind that that's exclusive to MySQL (if you need to port this code). Other databases have other functions for that (isnull in SQL Server, nvl in Oracle, etc., etc.). I used coalesce so that I could keep this query all ANSI-fied.

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