Say you have a column in a search table by the name of politics.
So, my question is how can multiple values for a single field get represented in a single row and receive the benefits of an index? How can this data be represented?
I don't think that there's a perfect answer for your problem. One possibility would be to break the values out into multiple columns, one for each view, and have indexes on each of those columns, or at least the views that you consider most important. It might help to make them compound indexes, with each including several views that you think are likely to be searched on together.
Another, more normalized, approach would be to have two tables -- one for each user, and one for each view held by a user (encoded 1-16 if you like). This would have the advantage of being more readily extendable if you decide that there are more political views that you'd like to track in the future.
However... aren't you worried that a 'politics' table is likely to be corrupt? <g>
Bruce Feist
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