I have 2 related MySQL tables in a one to many relationship.

Customers: cust_id, cust_name, cust_notes

Orders: order_id, cust_id, order_comments

So, if I do a standard join to get all customers and their orders via PHP, I return something like:

• Jack Black, jack's notes, comments about jack's 1st order
• Jack Black, jack's notes, comments about jack's 2nd order
• Simon Smith, simon's notes, comments about simon's 1st order
• Simon Smith, simon's notes, comments about simon's 2nd order

The problem is that *cust_notes* is a text field and can be quite large (a couple of thousand words). So, it seems like returning that field for every order is inneficient.

I could use *GROUP_CONCAT* and JOINS to return all *order_comments* on a single row BUT order_comments is a large text field too, so it seems like that could create a problem.

Should I just use two separate queries, one for the customers table and one for the orders table?

Is there a better way?