Search Multiple Tables at in one query (MySQL/PHP#)

I hav开发者_如何转开发e about 15 tables, each table containing about 10, 000 rows and about 30 columns. I want the users of my site to be able to search for a Part Number, or a product/description and display the results. Regardless of which table it's in.

Each product page is the same as the name of each corresponding table. So if a product is found, it will just display a link to the correct page (the filename is the name of the table).

Can't we just do something like:

query = "find $q in dbase.tables"; ?

And if $q exists in a table, return the name of the table it was found in?

Any help is appreciated!

Thank you

If all the tables have the same structure you might be able to do that. (That sounds like it's a simplistic manual partitioning scheme.)

Anway to join multiple tables you can use

SELECT * FROM tbl1
UNION ALL
SELECT * FROM tbl2
...

And to get your simple access method you might create a view on that concatenation:

CREATE VIEW alltables AS
    SELECT * ... UNION ... 

Not ever tested this. But this view would then facilitate SELECT * FROM alltables WHERE find($q)... - you'd still need a valid query for the columns of course.

why do u have so many tables? why not have only one table of part #'s, than another table of descriptions and join on the part number?