How to join two tables without messing up the query - mysql

Question

I have this query for example (good, it works how I want it to)
SELECT `discusComments`.`memberID`, COUNT( `discusComments`.`memberID`) AS postcount
FROM `discusComments`
GROUP BY `discusComments`.`memberID` ORDER BY postcount DESC
Example Results:
memberid postcount
3 283
6 230
9 198
Now I want to join the memberid of the discusComments table with that of the discusTopic table (because what I really want to do is only get my results from a specific GROUP, and the group id is only in the topic table and not in the comment one hence the join.
SELECT `discusComments`.`memberID`, COUNT( `discusComments`.`memberID`) AS postcount
FROM `discusComments`
LEFT JOIN `discusTopics` ON `discusComments`.`memberID` = `discusTopics`.`memberID`
GROUP BY `discusComments`.`memberID` ORDER BY postcount DESC
Example Results:
memberid postcount
3 14789
6 8678
9 6987
How can I stop this huge increase happening in the postcount? I need to preserve it as before.
Once I have this sorted I want to have some kind of line which says WHERE discusTopics.groupID = 6, for example
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `discusComments` (
`id` bigint(255) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`topicID` bigint(255) NOT NULL,
`comment` text NOT NULL,
`timeStamp` bigint(12) NOT NULL,
`memberID` bigint(255) NOT NULL,
`thumbsUp` int(15) NOT NULL default '0',
`thumbsDown` int(15) NOT NULL default '0',
`status` int(1) NOT NULL default '1',
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=7190 ;
.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `discusTopics` (
`id` bigint(255) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`groupID` bigint(255) NOT NULL,
`memberID` bigint(255) NOT NULL,
`name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`views` bigint(255) NOT NULL default '0',
`lastUpdated` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `groupID` (`groupID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=913 ;

Answer 1

SELECT `discusComments`.`memberID`, COUNT( `discusComments`.`memberID`) AS postcount
FROM `discusComments`
JOIN `discusTopics` ON `discusComments`.`topicID` = `discusTopics`.`id`
GROUP BY `discusComments`.`memberID` ORDER BY postcount DESC
Joining the topicid in both tables solved the memberID issue. Thanks #Andiry M

Answer 2

You need to use just JOIN not LEFT JOIN and you can add AND discusTopics.memberID = 6 after ON discusComments.memberID = discusTopics.memberID
You can use subqueries lik this
SELECT `discusComments`.`memberID`, COUNT( `discusComments`.`memberID`) AS postcount
FROM `discusComments` where `discusComments`.`memberID` in
(select distinct memberid from `discusTopics` WHERE GROUPID = 6)

Answer 3

If i understand your question right you do not need to use JOIN here at all. JOINs are needed in case when you have many to many relationships and you need for each value in one table select all corresponding values in another table.
But here you have many to one relationship if i got it right. Then you can simply do select from two tables like this
SELECT a.*, b.id FROM a, b WHERE a.pid = b.id
This is simple request and won't create a giant overhead as JOIN does
PS: In the future try to experiment with your queries, try to avoid JOINs especially in MySQL. They are slow and dangerous in their complexity. For 90% of cases when you want to use JOIN there is simple and much faster solution.