Hello
I've just posted this question on the MySQL list but as I'm thinking of moving
to PostGresQL I thought I'd post to this list too... Hope someone can help!
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