fenway

This is definitely a *nix issue, not a mysql issue... clearly, it's not in your path.

Well, if you need to search multiple columns, your options are (a) multiple LIKE conditions, (b) FULLTEXT indexing, or © Sphinx/Lucene.

Yes, but in this case, it's an update... so you simply need to use mysql_affected_rows().

Plus most date widgets do this anyway.

You can look at FULLTEXT indexing, but that has all sorts of limitations.

Fulltext searches are funny... if you don't have a very large sample dataset, or too many matches are found, it won't return anything.

MySQL date format is YYYY-MM-DD... store it this way, and use DATE_FORMAT() to make it pretty on the way out.

What are you trying to do???

Well, you're "faking" a proper fulltext index, so there isn't much a choice. But you can roll-your-own rankings and weights.

You need to check the rows affected....

MySQL v5 uses InnoDB as the default... 4.1 was using MyISAM.

Huh?

Why pconnect? Why no password?

I don't understand... DATE_FORMAT() is your friend.

The problem is that databases aren't designed for iterations or loops -- they're based on sets.

Not really... if you ask it to ignore the errors, it will do as you say.

Those backticks are to escape special characters (like spaces) in table names and fields. MyISAM is the non-transactional database engine -- as opposed to InnoDB. Effects are broad and significant.

Yes... show STR_TO_DATE() output first to verify.

Careful with substring matches... you're not matching whole words.

I still don't see why 500+ tables would be required.

Maybe you should check the php refman to see what mysql_fetch_array returns.

What do you think? Where do you define the value of $db?

Then you need to check users.banned in the ON clause.

3.5M rows is nothing.

Your php mysql config section is wrong -- you shouldn't be logging in as root with no password.