Matching a value to multiple columns (in one statement) from a table using MySQL

Question

I\'m working with a table in MySQL that contains the following columns:

id, january, february, march, april, etc

The data in the table looks li

Answer 1

In my opinion this is caused from what appears to be poor table design (I am guessing that is just an example to simply your problem, but bear with me, and I think this concept could be modeled better.
Here are the tables:

  Things        Things_Months      Months
   thing_id       thing_id           Month_id
   thing_info     month_id           Month_Name
                  thing_month_id     order_field

and here would be the sql:

 select thing_info, month_name
  from things, things_months, months
  where things.thing_id = things_months.thing_id
    and things_months.month_id = months.month_id 
  order by things.things_info, months.order_field

The results would be

  thingy 1, January
  thingy 1, February
  thingy 2, April
  thingy 3, November
  thingy 3, December