Query unique author ids with published post of type job

Question

I'm trying to come up with a simple query to return an array of unique author IDs that have a post_status of 'publish' and a post_type of 'job'.

I know I can query using:

$args = array(
'post_type' => 'job',
'post_status' => 'publish'
);
$published_jobs = new WP_Query( $args );

But this seems horribly inefficient to iterate through the results when all I want is an array of unique author IDs. At most we will have 30 or so authors, but could have thousands of job posts.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

The most efficient means would be to query directly via wpdb:

$author_ids = $wpdb->get_col(
    "
    SELECT DISTINCT post_author
    FROM $wpdb->posts
    WHERE post_type = 'job'
    AND post_status = 'publish'
    "
);