If I understand what you are trying to do, this is how I would do it.
I would create two tables, one with two fields, flavor_id and
flavor_name (holding a list of all flovors offered at eny store-I
would call this a flavors table) and another with two fields,
flavor_id and store_id (which will tell you what flaovrs are offered
at any given store-I would call this a linking table). With this
configuration, you can do a search on the second table for any store
and find out what flavors it carries. You can also do a search to see
which stores cary a given compnation of flavors. If you want to
identify a store that crries the most flavors of a given set, you can
do searches for several stores and use use mysql_num_rows() to see how
many items there are in the result for each store. By comparing
results you can see which store has the most occurences.

You can use a php script in combination with SQL queries to accomplish
any of these things.

--Kenoli

On May 6, 12:11 pm, "Paul Lautman" <paul.laut...@btinternet.com>
wrote:
> Justin Voelker wrote:
> > On May 5, 10:03 am, strawberry <zac.ca...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On May 5, 6:33 am, Justin Voelker <justin.voel...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> Hello everyone: I am having a bit of a problem trying to wrap my
> >>> head around a particular select statement... I have a table that has
> >>> numerous stores. Beyond the normal address, city, state, zip
> >>> fields, each store record has 5 fields, 1 for each for ice cream
> >>> flavor carried at that particular store. I have a search box that
> >>> lets you search for ice cream flavors. Right now searching for one
> >>> flavor is hard enough since my select statement select all records
> >>> "where flavor1 = "x" or flavor2 = 'x' or...", but I would like the
> >>> ability to search for multiple flavors, and have the returned
> >>> results start with those stores that match the most flavors
> >>> searched upon. Does anyone have any way of doing this? Also, the
> >>> page is written in PHP so if you have any php related way to handle
> >>> this issue, I am more than happy to try them as well. Thank you!!!
>
> >> Normalize your data. Don't use 5 fields. Use a separate table instead
> >> e.g. store_flavors(store_id*,flavor_id*)
>
> > The rest of my data is normalized, this is the only piece that isn't
> > because I thought it would be easier to update the fields when I know
> > I am only looking at an exact set of 8 rather than every flavor for
> > every store (already nearing 50 after 1 day of work). If I put them
> > into a separate table how would I still perform that search?
>
> By using a JOIN as you do with all of your other normalised data of course.