A PHP/MySQL Question

Hey Guys,
Im using MySQL, and what I want to do is show only the first occurence records with distinct id values. Let me give an example, if I had the following table,

>create Table products_categories (
> product_id int ....,
> category_id int ...,
> )

I have two other tables, "products" and "categories" and since a single
product can belong to multiple categories, I get a side effect when
displaying all products, in that a single product can be displayed multiple
times (according to how many different categories it belongs to). For
example, if product "Apple-Orange juice", which has a product_id 1, belongs
to Apples category(category_id=3) and Oranges category(category_id=5), this
will result in two records in the products_categories table, looking like

"1,3" and "1,5"

Now when I do a select that needs to gather category, products and
products_categories fields, I get multiple records with the same
product_id, so I end up displaying the same product multiple times, when
instead I only want to display it once. So thus I want to get only one
occurence each of each distinct product_id. Now, Im solving this problem
right now via a php script, but was wondering if there was an SQL(or MySQL)
solution to this problem?

Thanks everyone,

Christian

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by fromdc:
Now, Im solving this problem
right now via a php script, but was wondering if there was an SQL(or MySQL)
solution to this problem?
[/quote]

yes there is. In stead of typing
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">code:</font><HR><pre>SELECT product_id FROM products_categories .... [/code]
use this one:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">code:</font><HR><pre>SELECT DISTINCT product_id FROM products_categories .... [/code]

That should do it.

Greetz,
EyE


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