Data Format and SQL Queries

In the latter years of my working life I was extracting data using SQL on a daily basis but I never came across data stored in this format.

a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:4:”book”;s:10:”John”;s:7:”chapter”;s:1:”3″;s:5:”verse”;s:1:”16″;}}

No doubt this format has a special name.

Can anyone tell me how to construct a SQL query to extract, say, book and chapter from this data which is held in a field called Start