fenway

Well, it seems like you were having trouble with DB access -that's related to the grants - so "SHOW GRANTS" to see what you've been granted.

Why not simply have them share a name attribute?

What's wrong with another join?

So does that mean it's fixed, or it's still a problem? W're using RC2.

Yeah, that's nonsense. The mismatch issue is just poor DBA management -- that will happen with CHAR, too. The conversion at lower length doesn't matter. And MySQL 5 support VARCHAR up to 65k, so there's no need to get into TEXT/BLOB hell for >255 anymore. Yes, if most of your data is taking up most of the VARCHAR space, then you don't get any benefit from the variable length aspect, and don't bother. But in the real-world, it's impossible to know. Also -- and the blog neglected to mention this -- if you have even one variable-length field in your table, you won't get any benefit from the fixed-width ones. In fact, I'm fairly certain that they get converted to VARCHAR without even asking you.

What are you trying to achieve here?

Yes, but only a code snippet relevant to your question.

Yeah, but you don't know how many zeros were replaced.

Dump the grants.

Don't try and describe what you want in pseudo-SQL -- explain it in plain Engilsh.

Oh, it will be much, much faster not to go and look.

Yes, group by can take any valid expression.

Nope. If you really want that, you'll need a "parent" table, and then subsequent child tables.

Easiest way it to have duplicate records in a single table.

Still bad.

Also, it's against the rules to ask for "urgent" help.

Aggregating how?

There can't be any difference between a sql query executed via phpmyadmin and via your script.

I don't understand what you mean.

Tens of millions.

The other easy way is always to store the "top_parent_uid" with each one.

You can left join to a derived table with 24 such rows.

200K rows is nothing -- leave it be.

That's already in there.