Re: How to store data

[Arie Nagel]

You could just make a VARCHAR field and enter a string 'code1, code2 ...coden)'

However if you want something approaching a normalized database you really should create a third table. In it you store the applicant_id and the job_code (I'm assuming these columns are primary keys in their tables). Each combination represents an interest.

Something like this:

CREATE TABLE interests(
job_id INT(4),
applicant_id INT(5),
PRIMARY KEY(job_id, applicant_id)
);

If you still want to output a comma separated list of job codes you could then use this:

SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(job_id SEPARATOR ', ') FROM interests
WHERE applicant_id = 1;