Should I store an array within one cell of a DB?

[medlington]

Hi,

Im new to all this so this MySQL stuff may be a daft question.

Im making a large registration form for one of my sites and most of the entries on the form are straight forward questions with 1 answer which can be easily stored within the MySQL DB. However for one of my questions there is a large list of possible answers and the user can select as many as they want.

My question is should I store the responses to this question in one cell of the DB seperated with commas or should I setup a column in the database for each of the possible answers for that question and then just store a true or false value for each one?

Are there any obvious benefits from doing it either way?

Thanks

[alligatortek]

You could either store all of the answers as an array, or you can have a separate table for that question, and join it to another table via an ID of sorts. Or you can have a separate table just for answers to the questions. Lets assume that you have a question #4 on your form that has multiple available answers. Your return table would look something like this:


AnswerID QuestionID UserID Answer
1 1 1 true
2 2 1 false
3 3 1 false
4 4 1 baseball
5 4 1 football
6 4 1 hockey

You can store multiple users' answers in this table, and it would allow you to query easily in order to recognize trends. The AnswerID would be an auto-incremented unique number, and is sort-of irrelevant to you, but good practice to include. notice the last three rows are three answers to 1 question by the same user. does that make sense?

[alligatortek]

Sorry, I couldn't get that table to format better.

[medlington]

Thanks for the advice, I was just thinking about creating a seperate table for that question. I think this would be easier as Im am starting to get a grip on creating and linking tables but dont really know much about working with arrays.

Thanks again