ascii, binaries and serialization
 

I've got that table with those columns

mainid (int3)
zone1 varchar(255)
item1 int(3)
pic1 (mediumblob)

there are 64 zones all with same info (zone2,item2,pic2 and so on) and I am trying to avoid to create 3x64 additional columns

I need to do do a left join for each item* to get the item name and description from another table.

My assumption is that you cannot mix and match ascii and binaries in same serialized column

My approach is to

1-leave first table as is and serialize all zone and item (64 of them)

2-create a second table for pic with
mainid
pic

and serialize all pictures in there

then

do a query_first where mainid=xx
foreach zone I run a query to get the item name and description from the unserialized item, then do a second query to get all the unserialized images

Is there a better way of doing this?