MySQLi WHERE LIKE multiple criteria

Question

I have the following example table and attributes:

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|  Name  |       Town     |
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| Name 1 |      POOLE          


        

Answer 1

This is an iteration of an often-asked class of questions: How do I select on a single datum, if I have more than one in a field?

The answer, as always, is: You don't.

There are many reasons for that, but one of the most important is performance: Basically a LIKE '%...' can't use an index. That might be ok with a handful of test rows, but it quickly becomes a problem when scaling.

The only reliable ways are to

• either normalize your data
• or use a fulltext index

In your case I'd strongly vote for normalization: Create a towns table, then link it to the players via a join table. You can now search for any town with full index use, finding the players through the join.