This is something like how the current system (in PHP) works, but it uses LIKE in the SELECT and sometimes returns incorrect results. I didn't know you could use REGEXP and I can see how it would fix that problem - thank you.

Your second suggestion could also work for me, but as you imply, it is not guaranteed that the query will contain a value for the single-value fields.

In reply to Re^6: OT - SQL choosing a schema for index tables by bangor
in thread OT - SQL choosing a schema for index tables by bangor

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