title: SQL counting the top occurrences of substrings seperated by commas in a column
body: <p>I have a column in MYSQL with a list of comma-separated names of varying lengths. Some example columns would be: <code>,bob,joe,mike,</code> or <code>,steve,bill,dan,</code>. </p>
  
  <p>I'm looking to sort by the names that occur the most in all columns and be able to count how many times they occur. For example it could return that Joe is the most common name with x occurrences in all of the columns and that bob is the second most common name with y occurrences in all of the columns.</p>
  
  <p>Is there an effective way to go about this or am I better off storing each name individually as their own record? This table has records added to it quite often so if I could cut down on the size that would be ideal.</p>