MySQL: How to store/retrieve artist information? - php

Question

It's very confusing; it seems like I'll need to have at least one many-to-many relationship.
A track might be sung by 2+ artist - how can I store that in the database?
While showing that track, I want link to each artist so that when users click the track it opens that artist's profile page.
Can anyone provide me with some assistance in designing a class or classes to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Try something like that
tblSongs
SongId
Title
YearProduced
etc.
tblArtist
ArtistId
Name
ProfilePage
etc..
tblSongArtists
SongId
ArtistId
Then your queries could look something like
SELECT Title, YearProduced, Name, ProfilePage
FROM tblSongs S
LEFT OUTER JOIN tblSongArtists SA ON SA.SongId = S.SongId
LEFT OUTER JOIN tblArtists A ON A.ArtistId = SA.ArtistId
WHERE Title = 'I got the blues' -- ....
ORDER BY SongId -- or Song Title (*)
(*) order by clause is in case the search criteria produces more than one song, and if you wish to keep the artists for a given song in sequence.
Such a query produces multiple rows for a song with several artists, one row per artists, the values of the columns from tblSongs being repeated.

Answer 2

Any many-to-many relationship requires three tables. For your example:
Song<br/>
Name SongID
Artist <br/>
Name ArtistID
ArtistsInSongs <br/>
ArtistID SongID
I'll let you figure out the rest.

Answer 3

public static function find_artist_on($track_id=0) {
global $database;
$sql = "SELECT * FROM " . self::$table_name ." s " ;
$sql .= "LEFT OUTER JOIN trackartist TA ON TA.track_id =s.track_id";
$sql .= "LEFT OUTER JOIN artist A ON A.artist_id =TA.artist_id";
$sql .= " WHERE s.artist_id=" .$database->escape_value($track_id);
$sql .= " ORDER BY artist_id ASC";
return self::find_by_sql($sql);
}