Question

I have an application which populates a text file with information in CSV format. The problem is, the number of columns for each records should be flexible and it’s not constant. I am trying to implement the same datastructure but in MySQL for faster reading and parallel writing from many nodes.

Here is a sample taken from my CSV File

like|love|adore|admire
hate|dislike
revive|resurrect
info|information|pieces of information|data
shoot|snipe|kill|hunt

Each record represents words with the same meaning. Later on, I get the synonyms of a word using that CSV file. For example, I get the synonyms for the word hate which is dislike using a function in my application that parses the csv file and outputs the matching words.

What options do I have to do the same implementation approach but using MySQL?

Answer 1

You are dealing with many-many relationships here. The off-the-top-of-my-head solution would look something like:

CREATE TABLE words (
    id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    word VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL UNIQUE
);
CREATE TABLE synonyms (
    word_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    synonym_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL
    PRIMARY KEY (word_id, synonym_id)
);

Then, to get all the synonyms for word $X with an id of $Y:

SELECT w.id, w.word
FROM synonyms s
JOIN words w ON (s.synonym_id = w.id)
WHERE s.word_id = $Y;

This way you could also add antonyms at some point.