Affiliate Project gets better at SQL

Posted on August 21, 2009 by Paul · Posted in Affiliate Tools

This affiliate business is a steep learning curve and this is great. We are not afraid of learning. During our 6 month journey so far we have learnt many things a few of which are Web Design, SEO and pulling data feeds but one of area we are recently really improving our knowledge in is SQL.

With the sites that we are currently doing we are mainly using product feeds and we often get these from different merchants and each merchant has their own way of doing their feeds. So we are getting better and better and pulling the right data out of these feeds and manipulating it in the way we need to to make sure our sites are displaying the best selection of products and the right products for the pages the customers are looking at. This involves using quite complex SELECT statements with a variety of arguments, joining table outputs together and then getting results on the joined information.

Both Gary and I have found this really interesting. SQL is a great tool and thinking it through in your mind and on paper about how to get the correct information out of a database and into tables and displayed on the web page is both an interesting and challenging task.