Hello MySQL users I was wondering if one of you could advise me on the best solution to a problem I'm having - I'm sure this has been done before but haven't found anything in the archives.
Basically the problem I am having is how best to handle multiple values for a specific column, in this case the values in question are coming from an HTML SELECT MULTI box processed by PHP. The way I have been doing this so far is to have a delimited value stored in a varchar column, e.g. If my select box returns the values 2,4 and 7 I insert into my table the string '|2|4|7|'. Surely there must be a better way than this - but it escapes me. In this setup the only way to match a specifc value when searching is to use the query: SELECT dataid,title FROM table WHERE category LIKE '%|4|%' Which obviously has a huge performance penalty - and of course you can't JOIN against any of these values. The only other way I thought of was to use a separate table for the category entries: SELECT dataid,title,category FROM table LEFT JOIN table_categories ON table.dataid=table_categories.dataid But in the example above this would return 3 entries, which I don't want, and I can't select a particular dataid which satisfies more than category, e.g. has categories 4 and 7 (i.e. for the example above the LIKE statement would be: WHERE category LIKE '%|4|%' AND LIKE '%|7|%'). Any ideas? Please help! Cheers, james --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
