<p>In asp.net, you can retrieve MULTIPLE datatables from a single call to the database.  Can you do the same thing in php?</p>

<p>Example:</p>

<pre><code>$sql ="select * from t1; select * from t2;";
$result = SomeQueryFunc($sql);
print_r($result[0]); // dump results for t1
print_r($result[1]); // dump results for t2
</code></pre>

<p>Can you do something like this?</p>

This should be possible with newer MySQL and the mysqli (improved) php extension.
I'm not sure if any DB abstraction layers support this.
See relevant
MySQL docs
and
PHP docs
.