You can use GROUP_CONCAT:
SELECT person_id,
GROUP_CONCAT(hobbies SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id;
As Ludwig stated in his comment, you can add the DISTINCT operator to avoid duplicates:
SELECT person_id,
GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT hobbies SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id;
As Jan stated in their comment, you can also sort the values before imploding it using ORDER BY:
SELECT person_id,
GROUP_CONCAT(hobbies ORDER BY hobbies ASC SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id;
As Dag stated in his comment, there is a 1024 byte limit on the result. To solve this, run this query before your query:
SET group_concat_max_len = 2048;
Of course, you can change 2048 according to your needs. To calculate and assign the value:
SET group_concat_max_len = CAST(
(SELECT SUM(LENGTH(hobbies)) + COUNT(*) * LENGTH(', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id) AS UNSIGNED);
For MySQL 5.0.3 and higher, you can use BIT. The manual says:
As of MySQL 5.0.3, the BIT data type is used to store bit-field
values. A type of BIT(M) enables storage of M-bit values. M can range
from 1 to 64.
Otherwise, according to the MySQL manual you can use BOOL or BOOLEAN, which are at the moment aliases of tinyint(1):
Bool, Boolean: These types are synonyms for TINYINT(1). A value of
zero is considered false. Non-zero
values are considered true.
MySQL also states that:
We intend to implement full boolean
type handling, in accordance with
standard SQL, in a future MySQL
release.
References: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/numeric-type-overview.html
Best Answer
You can set the wait_timeout variable to a shorter time than the default and it should kill off the connections once they exceed this time value.
From what I've read there is some bugginess and connections will still randomly hang around, especially under load, but the wait_timeout variable would be the place to start.