Question

In MySQL I have one particular cell with data something like this

5,6,7,8,9

If I need to search for specific 2 numbers one after another I do a query with LIKE statement for those 2 particular numbers. For ex. I need to check if there’s a row with numbers 6 & 7 *in a row* I do

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE '%,6,7,%' OR column LIKE '%,6,7' OR column LIKE '6,7,%'

It’s little redundant and clumsy. If I ‘convert’ those numbers into multiple rows, for ex. every number would become it’s own row with column ‘numbers‘ ordered with ‘sort‘ column so I know the order of rows.

id    numbers    sort
55     8         4
56     6         2
57     5         1
58     7         3
59     9         5
...

What’s the identical query for this case? So I would have the same result as with the query above. I need to order the query with sort column and check if the numbers 6,7 are occurring one after another with that sorting.

Answer 1

Should be something like this. (if I understood right your problem). It will return nothing if the 2 numbers are not in sequence by the sort column.

select * 
from table t1
join table t2 on t1.sort=t2.sort+1
where t1.numbers=6 and t2.numbers=7

if you do not know which one should be first you can use it like this:

select * 
from table t1
join table t2 on t1.sort=t2.sort+1 or t1.sort+1=t2.sort
where t1.numbers=6 and t2.numbers=7