Querying on part of a column

[lxndr]

I have a database item which always has 16 characters (varchar), each of which is set to either "0" or "1".  It's used to indicate which of 16 different characteristics  (a "1" indicates the existence of a characteristic) are present in a particular item and has values such as:

 

0000010000000010

0000000000000000

1110110110000001

 

etc

 

What I'd like to be able to do is produce some statistics to show how often individual characteristics have occurred.  I can see that I could easily do that by running 16 SQL queries (one for each of the 16 characters) but was wondering if there was a better or more efficient way of doing it ?

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[fizix]

It may be more efficient to read the whole string in to a PHP string and use square brackets to read each character, like so:

 

$string = 'abcdef';
echo $string[0];                 // a
echo $string[3];                 // d