Question

i have a problem in mysql query.
this is how my tables looks like:

mysql> select username, specialty from users;
+----------+------------------+
| username | specialty        |
+----------+------------------+
| JinkX    | php, html, mysql |
| test1    | html             |
+----------+------------------+


mysql> select name, tags from tasks;
+----------------+------+
| name           | tags |
+----------------+------+
| fix front page | html |
+----------------+------+

and when i try to do the following query, it works only if the specialty equals exactly the tags. but i want it to work on both

mysql> select tasks.name from users left join tasks on tasks.tags LIKE users.specialty where users.username = 'test1';
+----------------+
| name           |
+----------------+
| fix front page |
+----------------+

mysql> select tasks.name from users left join tasks on tasks.tags LIKE users.specialty where users.username = 'JinkX';
+------+
| name |
+------+
| NULL |
+------+

Answer 1

Well, you’ve discovered the pain of saving independent values as a comma-delimited string.

If you can, I would suggest that you change your data structure, get the specialty column out of the user table, and create a new user_specialty table that would have foreign keys to users.username and tasks.tags.

+----------+------------------+
| username | tag              |
+----------+------------------+
| JinkX    | php              |
| JinkX    | html             |
| JinkX    | mysql            |
| test1    | html             |
+----------+------------------+