Are you having specific problems with the numeric values, or is this more of a design question? From a design viewpoint, if I understand your question, I would have a int column for each numeric in my table definition in mysql. I could then use the between sql syntax to do my selects from that table. If you have to keep the range as a single entry into the table, I would guess the column on the table in defined as varchar and the selects will have to do some regex work to pull the data on searches.