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Asked: 2026-05-20T13:51:21+00:00

Is serialize the best way to do this? If, say, I have a database

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Is serialize the best way to do this?

If, say, I have a database of music and I want to classify music by genres. If I allow for multiple genres for a given album, do I store them as an array and serialize them? Like this?

$array = serialize(array(1,2,3)); // numbers are IDs of genres

I get that from another post here. I know I can unserialize them. What I don’t get is how I would write an SQL statement that would retrieve some or all of the data. What would my SQL statement look like if I wanted to retrieve all of the genres for a given album?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You really want to normalise the data and store the genres and the album to genre association in different tables.

    i.e.: You’d ideally have three tables:

    1. Albums The album data
    2. Genres The genre data
    3. Album -> Genre lookup The album id and genre id that forms each association

    By doing this you’ll be able to trivially add/remove, etc. genres as required in the future and will be able to perform lookups by joining the tables rather than having to perform string manipulation.

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