Question

So to my knowledge there is no sets, lists, dicts, or arrays in mysql. I want to build a system that has two core components, information about a game match, and then a list of the characters played in the match. If there were lists in mysql then I would do something like this:

game_id INT,
characters list<varchar>,
....more data

The basic query that I want to be able to do is something like this:

SELECT * FROM games WHERE characters IN LIST(list);

Its possible I may select with only one character, or i may specify 10 characters. The question is how to do this efficiently in mysql versus using 10 WHERE clauses with OR. There is also no specific ordering to the characters…but I suppose I could order them based on their IDs.

The only way I have thought of doing this nicely is creating the first table with the basic information and a second table with just character ids and the game_id.

Anyone have a suggestion on how to organize this data nicely with some fancy mysql tricks that I may not know about? The queries need to be fast too, as there will probably be a lot of them eventually. It will be way more reads than writes unless I add a view/download counter….than i guess it will be more writes/updates than reads.

Thanks and I am happy to give anymore information.

Answer 1

Two ways I can think of, if I understand your question correctly….

METHOD 1 … adding a game_characters table that looks like …

CREATE TABLE `games_characters` (
  `game_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `character_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  KEY `games` (`game_id`),
  KEY `characters` (`character_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

… then the query would be something like …

SELECT *
FROM `games` as g
LEFT JOIN `games_characters` as gc
  ON (g.`id` = gc.`game_id`)
WHERE gc.`character_id` IN (12,52,86,23)

METHOD 2 … using LIKE, less ideal for large databases, but avoids an extra table … the characters record would contain a bunch of ids from another table, characters, delimited by a period like so “.23.51.252.75.93.”. The query would look like

SELECT *
FROM `games`
WHERE `characters` LIKE '%.23.%'
   OR `characters` LIKE '%.58.%'

Your CMS would have to parse and rebuild the string.