-----Original Message----- From: Beau Hartshorne [mailto:be...@members.evolt.org] Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 9:56 PM To: 'Rich Hutchins' Cc: mys...@lists.mysql.com Subject: RE: Perplexed by reverse SELECT statement.

Hi Rich,

I think that instead of a readBY column in your news table, you should use what's called a lookup table. In this case, the lookup table would store the primary key from the news table and the primary key from the user table. Your table structure might look something like this:

user

---------- user_id username password

news

---------- news_id headline body

user_news (the lookup table)

---------- user_id news_id

The data in the user_news table will look something like:

SELECT user_id,news_id FROM user_news;

+---------+---------+ | user_id | news_id | +---------+---------+ | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 10 | | 1 | 9 | | 2 | 23 | | 1 | 23 | +---------+---------+

This means user 1 has read news items 2,10,9 and 23. User 2 has read only news item 23. With this structure, you should be able to build a SELECT query to find the information you need.

Beau

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