fenway

Sorry, what are you trying to achieve?

This seems like a php question.

Use an IF() in the where clause instead.

You'll need to count them separately.

Not really... there's no simple way to combine them.

If you don't need to access the images across multiple machines, save yourself the headache and just store a relative pathname.

I don't understand your question.

Parsing errors are outside the realm of mysql.

Add those two expression as additional ORDER BY "columns".

I'm sorry, I don't follow -- maybe someone else will help.

I don't follow.

If you're just checking to see if a given unique value exists, use count(*) and check mysql_num_rows().

We're going to need at least the query itself, and the EXPLAIN output.

You mean a GROUP BY, COUNT(*) with an ORDER BY clause?

You can use a HAVING clause to remove them entirely, or ORDER with that expression.

Sure.

Get the result set working first, then worry about the ordering.

Same exact column type/definition?

How about show us the actual sql statement... and tables?

If you can suffer through the setup, then yes.... otherwise, weighting it like you've written may be inefficient but appropriate for small workloads.

Yup, just as I suspected... utf8_bin... a binary, case-sensitive, collation.

Show us the table definition.

Huh? Are you asking why you would do it? How would I know?

Well, a FULLTEXT search with return relevance, but if you want any control over it, you have to do it yourself -- or use a third-party solution like sphinx.

Please don't -- and by that I mean (a) don't make a separate table for each user and (b) don't use a hyphen in your table name.