extracting data from a comma-deliniated list in a Mysql database

College Kid,

Storing comma-delimited lists in a single database column is generally considered "a bad idea".  Why? Mainly, for the very reason you are struggling with - relating that data to other tables.  The preferred way to store multiple values would be through a relationship or join table.  Here's how that could work (there might be some subtle issues with the table structure/query syntax below as I don't have any experience with MySQL, only Microsoft SQL Server):

Meetings Table:

meeid (integer)

meedate (date or date/time)

Personnel Table:

personnelID (or whatever it is called in your table) (integer)

fullname (varchar())

email (varchar())

... the rest of the columns in the existing table

MeetingsPersonnel Table:

meeid (integer)

personnelID (integer)

Instead of storing a comma-delimited list of personnel id's in the meememberIDs column of your Meetings table, you would insert a record in the MeetingsPersonnel table for each combination of meeting and personnel.  So in the example above, the three entries you showed would be stored in the MeetingsPersonnel table like this:

meeid     personnelID

2         3

2         5

2         67

Now if you wanted to generate a list of people who attend meetings, you join Meetings to Personnel through the MeetingsPersonnel table:

SELECT p.fullname,
       p.email
FROM meetings m
     INNER JOIN meetingspersonnel mp on m.meeid = mp.meeid
     INNER JOIN personnel p on mp.personnelID = p.personnelID
WHERE m.meedate = '2014-06-15'

If you create appropraite indexes on these tables, this arrangement will perform very, very fast.

The alternative is to write your own function to parse the comma-delimited list into a temporary table, then use the temporary table to be the intermediate join.  This will be highly inefficient, especially as the number of employees who attend a specific meeting increases.

-Carl V.