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I'm making a kind of address book thingy and seem to have confused myself on the best way of organizing the tables. At the moment, I have two tables, Contact and Number.

Here's a basic representation of my tables:


The reason a contact's number are stored in a separate table is because each contact may have 0 or more numbers associated with it.

Is this a good design? Cause the way I'm looking at it now, I have to hit the database with an extra call for each contact. One query to get a list of all contacts, then I'll have to loop through each contact to do an additional query to get their numbers. Seems inefficient to me. Is there a better way to query for the results?

I tried something like this:


But not only does that return a lot of redundant data (repeating the contact info for each number belonging to the same person) but it also won't return any contacts if they don't have any numbers associated.

If a contact can have multiple numbers, then this way is probably the only way. Perhaps you could use foreign keys in the numbers tables to directly refer to the contacts table instead of using generic IDs. I'm not the best at database design myself.

Look at LEFT OUTER JOIN. It will return all contacts whether there are any associated numbers. The number columns will just return as NULL where that cid does not exist for a given contact.

Something like;