Display topics that reside in two junction tables

[quote=“busboy, post:1, topic:202200, full:true”] Am I using the wrong type of join for this situation?[/quote]the problem is, you’re joining to two one-to-many relationships at the same time, and thereby getting cross join effects

you’ll have to do the counting in subqueries –

SELECT a.topicID , a.topic , b.numberOfTestimonialsAssigned , COALESCE(c.topics,0) AS numberOfStudiesAssigned FROM topics AS a INNER JOIN ( SELECT topicID , COUNT(*) AS numberOfTestimonialsAssigned FROM testimonialtopics GROUP BY topicID ) AS b ON b.topicID = a.topicID AND b.numberOfTestimonialsAssigned > 0 LEFT OUTER JOIN ( SELECT topicID , COUNT(*) AS topics FROM studytopics GROUP BY topicID ) AS c ON c.topicID = a.topicID