8 table need to design queries for all possible combinations...

[chergh]

Whatever you are doing you are doing it in a silly way, your problem isn't the 256 queries it's that the way you store your information is rubbish. Change it.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

HARDY - TRY THIS

assuming your membership tables have the same member number, then do a sinlge query for each table

ie
select dataitems from tbl_1 where user = targetid
select dataitems from tbl_2 where user = targetid
select dataitems from tbl_3 where user = targetid

etc

then do a union query with the sql so you get

select dataitems from tbl_1 where user = targetid
union
select dataitems from tbl_2 where user = targetid
union
select dataitems from tbl_3 where user = targetid

etc

you will now have a single table with all the inof in

the only issue is that the column types of all the union-ed queries have to match

 

[hardy1976]

chergh - Thanks, but like I said this is not a dB, its using a database (the only way I could think how to) reaching a required result; I know how to normalise data etc - however this is one occasion were, well as you can all tell there seems to be no easy way of reaching a swift conclusion.


gemma-the-husky - thanks kind of what I've done in a flipped way, I've used union to pull all the files together - doing this by id would take ages as there are a couple of thousand people in the file.

Thanks
H

 

[The_Doc_Man]

If you had merged these into a single table and included a table-ID in the resultant record, you could have sorted on person ID first, table ID second, and not had to do ANY combinatorial stuff.