Question

Imagine you have two tables

 table: name            table: keyword
 id   name              nameId   keyword
 1    dude1             1        blue
 2    dude2             1        tall
                        2        blue
                        2        short

My objective is that if you search for blue and tall the result would be:

name   matches
dude1  2
dude2  1

I am also using PHP but I would like to do as much as I can with only MySQL.
Any ideas? Pointing me in the right direction would be nice.

Answer 1

You need to join both columns using INNER JOIN (that’s it if you want only records that has atleast a match on the other table otherwise use LEFT JOIN) and link them with name.id = keyword.nameid. Use aggregate function COUNT and group them by their name.

SELECT a.name, COUNT(b.nameID)
FROM name a INNER JOIN keyword b
        on a.id = b.nameID
WHERE b.keyword = 'tall' or
      b.keyword = 'blue'
GROUP BY a.name

or

SELECT a.name, COUNT(b.nameID)
FROM name a INNER JOIN keyword b
        on a.id = b.nameID
WHERE b.keyword IN ('tall','blue') 
GROUP BY a.name

SQLFiddle Demo