MySQL join many to many single row

Question

I have 3 tables that I want to combine, see below for details:

product

• productID
• name
• price

prod_cat

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Answer 1

You need two joins:

SELECT
    product.productID,
    category.categoryID,
    product.name,
    product.price,
    category.name
FROM product
JOIN product_cat ON product.productID = product_cat.productID
JOIN category ON category.categoryID = product_cat.categoryID

If a product could be in no categories and you still want to return it, change JOIN to LEFT JOIN in both places.

An alternative approach:

SELECT
    product.productID,
    product.name,
    product.price,
    GROUP_CONCAT(category.name)
FROM product
JOIN product_cat ON product.productID = product_cat.productID
JOIN category ON category.categoryID = product_cat.categoryID
GROUP BY product.productID

However it might be better just to use two queries instead of putting multiple values into a single cell.