Question

here is what i am trying to do, i want to store a list of values within a db record, so it is something like this:

| id |  tags     |
| 1  |  1,3,5    |
| 2  |  121,4,6  |
| 3  |  3,101,2  |

most of the suggestion i found so far suggest creating a separate join table to establish a many-to-many relationship, but in my case, i dont think it is suitable to create a separate table because the tags values are just a list of numbers.

the best i can think of right now is to store the data as a csv string, and parse it accordingly when it is retrieved, but i’m still trying to find a way where i can get the values as an array when i retrieve it from the db, even better if i can restrict the number of elements in the list, is there any better way to do this?

I haven’t decided which database to use yet, most probably postgresql, but im open to others if it can help me implement this better,

Answer 1

On PostgreSQL you can use array type.

On MySQL you can use set type.

Then it depends on what you really need.