Query builder and multiple linked tables...

Question

Hi all,
I have a database with a large table (50+ fields) and lots of tables (at
least 10 tables) linked to the bigger one.
I can link 7 or 8 tables using Query builder but after that, it gets slow
and slower.
I can't link other tables since it appear to hang.
How can I solve this?
Here is a sample of the large table (articles):
- id_art
- code_art
- material_id_art (fk)
- color_id_art (fk)
- finishing_id_art /fk)
- and so on... with other fields set as foreign keys.
The color table is:
- id_col
- colid_col
- name_col
- language_col
The table view is:
id_col colid_col name_col language_col
1 1 rosso it
2 1 red uk
3 1 rojo es
The other tables follow the same color table specification.
I would like to obtain all articles with color_id_art field equal to the
color.colid_col field AND color.language_col equal to a session variable
(language). This session variable contains 'it', 'uk', or 'es', depending
on user selection on other pages.
I can use query builder to do something similar with few tables but when
the linked tables are 10 or more the query builder began to slow down too
much and is totally unusable.
Is there a way to create such a query manually?
I'm not a SQl programmer so, I have not all the knowledge to do this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction or point me to some tutorial
about such a problem?
I thank you in advance.
tony

Answer 1

Ciao Tony,
Well, the main table is 4000+ records
I´ve heard of other users having similar issues with this (or more) amount of data, what´s not surprising, because every time you´re making a change to your query, the Query Builder tries to refresh the browser
I think that the problem is related to too much inner joins and too many WHERE clauses with AND condition
maybe this might add to the problem, but I´m pretty convinced that the major bottleneck is the substantial amount of records your main table has.
Günter, can I ask you how would you manage a multilingual product catalog where the main table (products) has lots of linked details tables (color, finishing, structure...) to be translated on a number of languages?
this is indeed a little tricky by nature, however I think that storing e.g. all the international color names in a table is too complicated, when you could simply...
a) check the currently running language session variable
b) define a PHP if/else condition which will "virtually" translate the stored "id_col" values, example:
if ($_session['language'] == "uk") {
$pattern = array("1", "2", "3", "4");
$replace = array("red", "blue", "black"', "green");
$colors = str_replace($pattern, $replace, $row_queryname['columnname']);
else {
$pattern = array("1", "2", "3", "4");
$replace = array("rosso", "blu", "nero"', "verde");
$colors = str_replace($pattern, $replace, $row_queryname['columnname']);
3. later in your page "echo" the alias variable $colors, which should return different results depending on the currently active language session variable
Cheers,
Günter Schenk
Adobe Community Expert, Dreamweaver