adhok

thanks barand. I didn\'t think of your way. but your way also takes a long time (25 sec on my server). In the end I found another way to do this, by adding a new field to the db for the bad category. it\'s a bit redundant, but a lot faster!

I\'m modifying some code for a community news website, so that the main news wire shows every story posted - except for one category of stories. Not every story is categorised. So I have to SELECT all categorised stories which aren\'t from $bad_category_id, and I have also SELECT all un-categorised stories. I\'ve found a way to do it but it\'s very slow. The news is in a table called webcast, the categories are linked to by a link table called catlink. catlink.id is the link to webcast.id, and catlink.catid is a link to another table category.id. I only found out about JOINS last night ... so maybe there\'s a better way. This is the (simplified) SQL: It\'s too slow. The opposite query (select only the bad category) is easy and fast: I tried this: But that caused a disk space error! Oops. I think it\'s wrong anyway... Yo thanks!