sql - Storing multiple choice values in database

Question

Say I offer user to check off languages she speaks and store it in a db. Important side note, I will not search db for any of those values, as I will have some separate search engine for search. Now, the obvious way of storing these values is to create a table like

UserLanguages
(
 UserID nvarchar(50),
 LookupLanguageID int
)

but the site will be high load and we are trying to eliminate any overhead where possible, so in order to avoid joins with main member table when showing results on UI, I was thinking of storing languages for a user in the main table, having them comma separated, like "12,34,65"

Again, I don't search for them so I don't worry about having to do fulltext index on that column.

I don't really see any problems with this solution, but am I overlooking anything?

Thanks, Andrey

Answer 1

Don't.

• You don't search for them now
• Data is useless to anything but this one situation
• No data integrity (eg no FK)
• You still have to change to "English,German" etc for display
• "Give me all users who speak x" = FAIL
• The list is actually a presentation issue

It's your system, though, and I look forward to answering the inevitable "help" questions later...