Question

I have a table for the users on my site. The table consists of the the columns

user_id, fname, lname, email, password, interest1, interest2, interest3, interest4,   
interest5

Now, It’s turning out to not be so practical to store the interests individually like so. What is a better way to do this. A way that keeps it easy to edit/access user interests?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Database normalization does what you want.

You’d create a new interests table with structure like this:

interest      user_id
"skiing"          1
"programming"     4
 etc...

Then, you can get all the interests for a given user with a query like this:

SELECT `interest` FROM `interests` WHERE `user_id` = :my_user_id;