Search, grab & append the rows

[damir]

I don't know how to create the fastest query for the next situation:

The goal is to search the database of users by their settings column, append a notification column and grab an email from an email column depending on the settings column. Problem is that the settings column is consisted of 10 hexadecimal chars (which means that one char is four 0 or 1 settings, which is total of 40 binary settings).

This is the lite example of the database:

id |  settings  |      email     | notify
 0 | 82b3ff4ab4 | [e-mail] | link,
 1 | 61baf32d7c | [e-mail] | null

I worked with mysqli prepared statements, so I don't know if it's the brightest idea to make a loop in php (which I'm using) and for every user check its settings and determine whether to grab an email or not and whether to append the notify column with the additional update query or not.

I've also had in mind to use SELECT in combination with WHERE and LIKE with wildcards and with the update query to append the notify column, but the problem is in the settings column.

Does anyone have ideas what's the best way to do that?

My hosting service block my page because too many queries caused the processor overloading, so I'm a bit scared of these things right now.

[Rabbit]

You haven't specified which setting requires an email. But I suspect that boolean operators will accomplish what you need.

[damir]

How I concept it... If someone sends a new message, all users have to be checked, and based on settings of every user to determine whether to grab an email (and send an email to user later) and append the notify column to that user.

So if e.g. new message setting is the 3rd char, then that char has to be converted to bin to check bin values of the email and notify settings.

entire settings column:
82b3ff4ab4

b converted from hex to bin is 1 0 1 1

1st bin value (1) is the email setting, and the 2nd one is the notify setting (0).

If it's 1 then send/append, or do nothing if it's 0.

[Rabbit]

If you substring out the third character, convert it to a number, and then bitwise-and 8, that will tell you if the e-mail setting is a 1 or 0. Or you could substring out the third character, convert it to binary, and substring the first character of that.