DragonChild,

I actually worked this problem here last week. My solution still feels a bit kludgy -- I'm not sure if this is because I don't feel 100% comfortable thinking in SQL or if it due to true kludgyness.

I can recommend one useful approach. If supported by your DB, you can create "views" which perform the table joins. Then you can set up Class:DBI to look at the views as if they were tables. This can result in more straight forward SQL queries than otherwise.

On the otherhand, I'm still having a hard time doing searches in an easy way out of the database when the data is "normalized" into a somewhat complex layout in the DB.

Good luck with your project.

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true
-- Michael Faraday