How create SQL pagination difficult join query with duplicate data? - sql

Question

I have several tables in the database.
Users, profiles and user roles.
The relationship of profiles and users one to one.
The relationship of roles and users many to many.
To select all users, I send the following request:
SELECT A.role_id, A.role_name, A.user_id,B.user_username, B.user_password, B.profile_color_text, B.profile_color_menu, B.profile_color_bg FROM
(SELECT Roles.role_id, Roles.role_name, UserRoles.user_id
FROM Roles INNER JOIN UserRoles ON Roles.role_id = UserRoles.role_id) AS A
LEFT JOIN
(SELECT Users.user_username, Users.user_password, Profiles.profile_color_text, Profiles.profile_color_menu, Profiles.profile_color_bg, Profiles.profile_id
FROM Users INNER JOIN Profiles ON Users.user_id = Profiles.profile_id) AS B
ON A.user_id = B.profile_id;
The question is how do I select a pagination?

Answer 1

I would get the 10 users first, then perform the joins. Two reasons for this:
Since you don't want specifically 10 results but just the results of 10 users, which could contain any number of rows, you can't get all the data then limit it, otherwise you could be getting 10 rows containing data for 5 users;
Even if point 1 were irrelevant because there was always a 1-1 relationship, and especially if the number of results is small like 10, it's faster to get those results first and then join on that smaller "table", rather than doing all your joins on all the data and then limiting it.
.
SELECT
u.user_id,
u.user_username,
u.user_password,
r.role_id,
r.role_name,
p.profile_id,
p.profile_color_text,
p.profile_color_menu,
p.profile_color_bg
FROM (
SELECT user_id, user_username, user_password
FROM users
ORDER BY ???
OFFSET 10
LIMIT 10
) AS u
LEFT JOIN profiles AS p
ON u.user_id = p.profile_id
LEFT JOIN userroles AS ur
ON u.user_id = ur.user_id
LEFT JOIN roles AS r
ON ur.role_id = r.role_id
I assume you'll want some order, so I've put an ORDER BY in there - to be completed.
OFFSET added to get the second page of results; first page wouldn't require it, or would be OFFSET 0. Then a LIMIT of course to limit the page size.
I've also restructured the joins in a way that made more sense to me.