Codeigniter Active Records LIKE Query

Question

I am making a news website with Codeigniter, and I have an Articles MySQL table like ID,Title,Body,Categories,Created etc...

In Categories field I have category separated with comma(,) like...

• Article 1 Categories : National,Crime,Cinema
• Article 2 Categories : National,City,Drama
• Article 3 Categories : Funny,International,Cinema
• Article 4 Categories : National,Crime,Cinema

I want to fetch article with Specific Category.. like National (1,2,4) . I tried many methods but nothing seems to work.

Please Help Thanks.

Answer 1

you can use FIND_IN_SET method to query your Categories field

FIND_IN_SET('Crime', your_table.Categories)

Your approach has a number of shortcomings, It would def be more scalable in the long run to change your tables relationship to Categories . You can use a manytomany relationship and a join table to more easily query your categories.

FIND_IN_SET will do a full table scan, and using this comma seperated way will be very difficult to aggregate, and get article/category counts.

---

Is storing a delimited list in a database column really that bad?

Bill Karwin has included this anti pattern as the first chapter in his excellent book.