Question

A while ago, I came to the realization that a way I would like to hold the skills for a player in a game would be through CSV format. On the player’s stats, I made a varchar of skills that would be stored as CSV. (1,6,9,10 etc.) I made a ‘skills’ table with affiliated stats for each skill (name, effect) and when it comes time to see what skills they have, all I have to do is query that single column and use PHP’s str_getcsv() to see if a certain skill exists because it’ll be in an array.

However, my coworker suggests that a superior system is to have each skill simply be an entry into a master “skills” table that each player will use, and each skill will have an ID foreign key to the player. I just query all rows in this table, and what’s returned will be their skills!

At first I thought this wouldn’t be very good at all, but it appears the Internet disagrees. I understand that it’s less searchable – but it was not my intention to ever say, “does the player have x skill?” or “show me all players with this skill!”. At worst if I wanted such data, I’d just make a PHP report for it that would, admittedly, be slow.

But it appears as though this is really faster?! I’m having trouble finding a hard answer extending beyond “yeah it’s good and normalized”. Can Stack Overflow help me out?

Edit: Thanks, guys! I never realized how bad this was. And sorry about the dupe, but believe me, I didn’t type all of that without at least checking for dupes. 😛

Answer 1

Putting comma-separated values into a single field in a database is not just a bad idea, it is the incarnation of Satan expressed in a database model.

It cannot represent a great many situations accurately (cases in which the value contains a comma or something else that your CSV-consuming code has trouble with), often has problems with values nested in other values, cannot be properly indexed, cannot be used in database JOINs, is difficult to dedupe, cannot have additional information added to it (number of times the skill was earned, in your case, or a skill level), cannot participate in relational integrity, cannot enforce type constraints, and so on. The list is almost endless.

This is especially true of MySQL which has the very convenient group_concat function that makes it easy to present this data as a comma-separated string when needed while still maintaining the full functionality and speed of a normalized database.

You gain nothing from using the comma-separate approach but lose searchability and performance. Get Satan behind thee, and normalize your data.