How would you approach 'Keywords' ??

[Mincer]

I have some project data that needs to be stored and searched on. Now I have created my full database schema bar one area that I am unsure exactly what the easiest way to approach it is. (this is MySQL).

I want to store up to 5 keywords about the projects (user input from a form), which can then be used as a seach string later on.

I am currently thinking either a delimited string field in the projects or a separate keywords table with 2 fields (project_id and keyword).

I think that moehod 2 would be better practice, and I'm unsure how exactly I'd search on the delimited string field. But I'd like a couple of opinions, and any other suggested methods.

[KodeKrash]

If you do delimited list, you could do something like this:

SELECT * FROM tblProject WHERE proKeyword LIKE '%strQuery,%';

It would be slighly more accurate than just:

SELECT * FROM tblProject WHERE proKeyword LIKE '%strQuery%';

[MattR]

I would place them in a keywords file. Recall that a LIKE '%anything' will result in a full table scan because the optimizer cannot use an index to match rows, so once you get many, many rows in the table it will bog down heavily. With a keywords table you can do something like this - LIKE 'bob%' and use an index on the keyword col.