I have a database which contains some topics each with a title and some description. In the title page, I have to display all the titles and a few lines of description for that topic. When a user clicks on one topic then he is taken to a page where he can find the entire description. Exactly like stackoverflow site, where description of each question is displayed in short.

I was wondering is there a way we can retrieve such short description from the database directly or should the front end parse the retrieved record and truncate it accordingly? Is there a way to query for a short version of the record from the database directly. I am using MySql as my database and php to display web pages.