fenway

I can't stand workbench -- they made it very annoying to edit individual rows -- especially those without PKs.

Just use underscores, like Perl.

Solved how?

I wish I had this much free time.

Probably because it's an auto-increment value -- but still a bad, bad idea.

Yes, but you are supposed to know which one you chose -- i.e. separated by tab, quote spaces, etc.

EXPLAIN would have helped a lot here.

And OBVIOUSLY you're not sending your passwords across the network so they will end up logs. And OBVIOUSLY you're not storing your passwords in plaintext. And OBVIOUSLY you're using a case-senstive collation.

It's troubling that you export your data, but you don't understand how, or why, it works.

Well, for starters, there's no way to ensure that each column contains the same type of information. Then there's the issue of unweildly queries, like the one above. And good luck ever re-partitioning.

Yeah, agreed -- some of them are huge.

ORDER BY RAND() performs very poorly on any reasonable amount of data. Which, IMHO, is fine, because very few real-world problems need totally random (or truly random) anyway.

CONVERT_TZ and the current timezone will help.

The usual consideration is whether or not you want it to be timezone aware.

You'll need multiple field values for VALUES -- i.e. VALUES (one,two), (three,four).

mysql_result() is less than ideal -- better to use a fetch call and get back a hash -- that will also make it clear what's going wrong. Also, you're completely open to SQL injection.

Agreed -- done.

I've heard nothing but horror stories about them.

Covers: Part 1: Using the MySQL Improved Extension, mysqli Part 2: Using the MySQL Extension, mysql Part 3: Using the PDO Extension With MySQL Driver, pdo_mysql Part 4: Using the MySQL Native Driver for PHP, mysqlnd Tutorial is here.

Well, a scalar subquery, that is.

Hopefully this presentation will stay online at scribd... it's simply fantastic, probably the best I've come across in recent memory. At 220 slides, it's quite lengthy -- but the lessons learned are invaluable, so be sure to read all the way to the end. A MUST READ!!!! EDIT: This year's version of the presentation -- some really great stuff in here, particuarly about hierarchies.

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets (PDF).

This resource covers a very broad range of topics... it's worth a look, though, especially if you're stumbling in the early stages of configuration.

Basically, this blog contains a regularly-updated run-down of MySQL functions, with a short description and a few hints on how to use them; RSS feed here.

Please read the excellent FAQ thread on this issue by our very own wildteen88.