MySQL: How to check for a specific value in a varbinary type?

Question

I'm working with a table that has a field called other_group_ids that is of type varbinary(255). An example vale of it would be: 3,7,14. I have a query that checks to see if a user is in a certain group. For instance, to check if they're in group 4, I do a LIKE on it:

SELECT user.* FROM users AS user WHERE user.other_group_ids LIKE '%4%';

This works just fine, but the problem is that it's also catching on 14. How can I change my query to make it just match on 4, but not other values like 14 or 41?

Thank you very much for any insights!

Answer 1

To answer your question, you can do something like:

SELECT user.* FROM users AS user 
WHERE user.other_group_ids LIKE '%,4,%' OR
    user.other_group_ids LIKE '4,%' OR
    user.other_group_ids LIKE '%,4'

Be aware that having a column with multiple values is not normalized and you should try to fix this if possible. To normalize, create a table called user_group that has user and group. The primary key would be (user, group) and would act as a reference table. Then you can simply query the users that are in group 4.