database schema - How to store arrays in MySQL?

Question

I have two tables in MySQL. Table Person has the following columns:

id	name	fruits

Answer 1

The proper way to do this is to use multiple tables and JOIN them in your queries.

For example:

CREATE TABLE person (
`id` INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
`name` VARCHAR(50)
);

CREATE TABLE fruits (
`fruit_name` VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
`color` VARCHAR(20),
`price` INT
);

CREATE TABLE person_fruit (
`person_id` INT NOT NULL,
`fruit_name` VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(`person_id`, `fruit_name`)
);

The person_fruit table contains one row for each fruit a person is associated with and effectively links the person and fruits tables together, I.E.

1 | "banana"
1 | "apple"
1 | "orange"
2 | "straberry"
2 | "banana"
2 | "apple"

When you want to retrieve a person and all of their fruit you can do something like this:

SELECT p.*, f.*
FROM person p
INNER JOIN person_fruit pf
ON pf.person_id = p.id
INNER JOIN fruits f
ON f.fruit_name = pf.fruit_name