I have a bit of an issue that I can not seem to figure out and was hoping to get some feedback/advice from you all.

First a little background. I have two databases and I am adding a new table too one of them. However I need to join the two databases but by columns and the columns I want to use to join them will use different data types and values.

Example database 1 column 1 will be groups.group.id and database 2 column 1 will be users.group.id. However in database 2 (users) the group_id will contain different data.

Database 1 group.id will contain a single integer and database 2 group.id I want to have it contain multiple integers seperated by a comma.

Example code:
select groups.group.id, groups.group.name
from groups, users
where groups.disabled='1'
and users.user_id = $user_id
and groups.group.id ? users.group.id

The "?" is where I am having trouble. Does anyone know of a way to join two databases by columns using different data types?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Some output errors? Post it here...

there's your problem right there

that is very poor design from the point of view of sql

you will never get the join to work

you have to retrieve the entire tables and do the join in your application code

messy, eh?

change your design and the sql join becomes trivially easy