Question

I am quite new at database programming and I am having trouble doing searches in my database. I have a table with a column named Required_Items, it is just a list of required items separated by ‘;’. I can’t get the server to return the rows when querying :

'SELECT * FROM The_Table WHERE Required_Items LIKE '%item1%' '

It seems that the database can’t find that item in the column. The problem is that I want to be able to return rows that contain ALL the items. I would try something like:

'SELECT * 
 FROM The_Table 
 WHERE Requiered_Items LIKE '%item1%' AND 
       Requiered_Items LIKE '%item2%' AND 
       Requiered_Items LIKE '%item3%' AND//etc...

How can I do that knowing that there will be a variable number of these “items” to test ?