Question

I have a field in my database that contain comma separated values these values are numbers, and I am trying to do a search and count the number of times that a number appears in that column throughout the column,

$sql = "SELECT sector_id_csv, COUNT(sector_id_csv) as count FROM cv WHERE sector_id_csv LIKE '$sectorId'";

This seems slow and does not return any results, and I know the sector_id it is search exists in the table.

Answer 1

Basically, this should work fine if you use % wildcards:

WHERE sector_id_csv LIKE '%$sectorId%'";

what tends to cause problems in this scenario, though, is the fact that a search for 50 will also find 501 502 503 and so on.

If you can rely on your comma separated list to have a trailing comma behind every entry, it would be more reliable to search for

50,

to catch that value only.