Alternative to LIKE clause in Mysql

Question

I have got a filed in my database table which stores categories. I am storing the categories in the following format:

1,12,15

Now when I try to

Answer 1

You have a many to many relation between products and categories. You should create a new table to store the coresponding categories(cat_ids) for each product. You shouldn't have a column containing multiple category ids. This way your select would be much easier and a lot faster.