Question

Can I store an array such as [1,2,3,4] or some JSON like {"name":"John Johnson","street":"Oslo, "phone":"5551234567"} as one record in mysql? If yes, is it really a good approach or for better result, Is it better to separate those and store in individual column and define the relationship? What is the good method in php to handle this?

EDIT: I want to make clear about what I wanted to do. I am using jquery UI and want to store the position of draggable and droppable in array format. The draggable and droppable will be identified with their ID along with their position so that they can be queried back and be created in the next html page whenever user wants to. I am not sure whether I have to explode those arrays, say like, in separate field like FROM_TOP, FROM_LEFT or just one array storage is sufficient. I was also little concerned about the efficiency.

Answer 1

You can; it is a bad idea. This violates something called normalization. You should have things separated out into individual columns and tables (as needed). It would require a lot of work to maintain the data in the JSON. Just think, you would have to update the whole record in PHP then update the record.

Say I just want to update the phone number…

Bad:

UPDATE `table` 
SET `Data` = '{"name":"John Johnson","street":"Oslo, "phone":"5551234567foo"}'

Good:

UPDATE `table` 
SET `Phone` = '5551234567foo'

Another reason this would be bad… querying would be slow with LIKE and very hard to be deterministic. Say you have a fax number field… which one would it be with the bad example?

Bad:

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `Data` LIKE '%5551234567%'

Good:

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `Phone` = '5551234567'

PHP really doesn’t deal with the schema or handling the data directly, so there is no method to directly handle that. It’s all done in the SQL.