What is the purpose of joining two tables in PHP and what are the potential benefits?

Joining two tables in PHP is necessary when you need to retrieve data from multiple tables that have a relationship between them. By joining tables, you can combine related data from both tables into a single result set, making it easier to work with the data and perform queries that involve data from multiple sources. This can help streamline your code and improve the efficiency of your database queries.

<?php
// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// SQL query to join two tables
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table1
        JOIN table2 ON table1.id = table2.table1_id";

$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    // Output data of each row
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "Column1: " . $row["column1"]. " - Column2: " . $row["column2"]. "<br>";
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}

$conn->close();
?>