The SET type in MySQL

[Anon]

One of the column types of a MySQL table is SET. I tried playing with in using phpMyAdmin but I always get an error when I wanted to set anything to type SET. Can anyone explain to me what a SET type does? I tried reading the MySQL reference but it doesn't really help much.

Thanks in advance!

[kparker]

SET is a bitmap internally (with a maximum of 64 different values) that is mapped to string on input/output. For example:

create table test
(
id int auto_increment,
// ...
direction set ('north','west','east','south'),
// ...
);

Now you can say things like:

insert into test (direction) values ('north');

select direction from test where id = some_value;