efficient query help please.

[Eikinskjaldi]

Originally Posted by SDB

hmmm.. ok, option a) thank you, that's what I have now.

option b) isn't quite what I meant..

What i meant is...

if I already have a query such as :

SELECT threadid from specialtable ....

SELECT sp.threadid, postid, count(*) as 'postcount'
FROM specialtable sp
LEFT OUTER JOIN post USING (threadid)
WHERE userid=blah
GROUP BY sp.threadid

the [postid] field will contain null if there are no posts, but the count will still be 1 (because there is 1 row in the result table

if you want to ignore null results then just do a join instead of a left outer join