Joining three tables using MySQL

Question

Use ANSI syntax and it will be a lot more clear how you are joining the tables:

SELECT s.name as Student, c.name as Course 
FROM student s
    INNER JOIN bridge b ON s.id = b.sid
    INNER JOIN course c ON b.cid  = c.id 
ORDER BY s.name 

Simply use:

select s.name "Student", c.name "Course"
from student s, bridge b, course c
where b.sid = s.sid and b.cid = c.cid 

For normalize form

select e1.name as 'Manager', e2.name as 'Staff'
from employee e1 
left join manage m on m.mid = e1.id
left join employee e2 on m.eid = e2.id

SELECT *
FROM user u
JOIN user_clockits uc ON u.user_id=uc.user_id
JOIN clockits cl ON cl.clockits_id=uc.clockits_id
WHERE user_id = 158

SELECT 
employees.id, 
CONCAT(employees.f_name," ",employees.l_name) AS   'Full Name', genders.gender_name AS 'Sex', 
depts.dept_name AS 'Team Name', 
pay_grades.pay_grade_name AS 'Band', 
designations.designation_name AS 'Role' 
FROM employees 
LEFT JOIN genders ON employees.gender_id = genders.id 
LEFT JOIN depts ON employees.dept_id = depts.id 
LEFT JOIN pay_grades ON employees.pay_grade_id = pay_grades.id 
LEFT JOIN designations ON employees.designation_id = designations.id 
ORDER BY employees.id;

You can JOIN multiple TABLES like this example above.

Don't join like that. It's a really really bad practice!!! It will slow down the performance in fetching with massive data. For example, if there were 100 rows in each tables, database server have to fetch 100x100x100 = 1000000 times. It had to fetch for 1 million times. To overcome that problem, join the first two table that can fetch result in minimum possible matching(It's up to your database schema). Use that result in Subquery and then join it with the third table and fetch it. For the very first join --> 100x100= 10000 times and suppose we get 5 matching result. And then we join the third table with the result --> 5x100 = 500. Total fetch = 10000+500 = 10200 times only. And thus, the performance went up!!!