Imagine a table for articles. In addition to the main query:
SELECT * From articles WHERE article_id='$id'
We also need several other queries to get
SELECT * FROM users WHERE user_id='$author_id' // Taken from main query
SELECT tags.tag
FROM tags
INNER JOIN tag_map
ON tags.tag_id=tag_map.tag_id
WHERE article_id='$id'
and several more queries for categories, similar articles, etc
Question 1: Is it the best way to perform these queries separately with PHP and handle the given results, or there is way to combine them?
Question 2: In the absence of many-to-many
relationships (e.g. one tag, category, author for every article identified by tag_id, category_id, author_id); What the best (fastest) was to retrieve data from the tables.