After reviewing the related questions, none of them seem to address mine, so here goes:I have two tables containing Course information. One table [course] holds, currently, nearly 25k records with fields such as CourseName, CourseCode, Term, Instructor, etc. The second table [courseCatalog] holds merely the CourseCode and CourseName. My application allows users to pull up an instructor and approve the courses from a list that they are allowed to teach.I built a search with auto-suggest (jQuery Ajax Object -> PHP file -> MySQL and back) to find courses. When they are returned the user can click the course to mark (Another Ajax call to PHP & MySQL) it as an approved course for the instructor.The problem is, there are some courses in the larger table that are not in the smaller table, and vice versa (eliminating that problem is a much harder issue based on where the data actually comes from, i digress)If I join the tables on any particular field, certain courses are left out. LEFT JOIN still seems to yield the same problem because I'm forced to JOIN ON a field.If I simply call to both tables:\[code\]SELECT DISTINCT course.CourseCode, course.CourseNameFROM course, courseCatalog\[/code\]The query takes FOREVER which renders the search function useless, as it takes to long to load the suggestions.I'd like to get a DISTINCT list of courses, in order, whether they appear in the 'course' table or the 'courseCatalog' table...with great haste 
Any suggestions? Have I overlooked something simple? Thanks all
Any suggestions? Have I overlooked something simple? Thanks all