fenway

IMHO, over-indexing, either in number or size, is going to be noticeable.

It will be stored if you store it -- but binary data shouldn't be in a database, as a general rule.

You can't use that kind of flow control in an update statement -- you need: editLock = IF( editCount > 2, '1', '0' )

And even so, 1 slow query is worse than 100 instant ones.

Perhaps you're seeing unicode issues.

When you want variable-length BINARY data -- which shouldn't be stored in the DB anyway.

The refman covers it all -- there are dozens of other subtle differences (trimming, index implications, etc.). More importantly, one variable-length column means you can't have any CHAR fields anymore.

I'm not sure I understand why you need to know... unless these two tables were UNION-able.

Not sure where you're pulling those metric from -- 25-50x faster for 8 bytes?

Don't try and make tables "smaller' -- it's just work for no reason.

(2) should be replaced with last-insert-id() -- or whatever the php function from mysqli is called.

Sounds like you just want to sort() in php.

You can't do a multi-table insert.

You need to cross join, one for each of the three conditions.

"display" has nothing to do with mysql.

Weird symbols how?

You mean like a JOIN?

Huh?

Turn on logging, check which user.

INSERT INTO...SELECT WHERE...

Use code tags next time.

If you're referring to a db wrapper class, then must be hundreds.

Best way is to use the mysql commands directly, if you can connect to both with the same user.

And there is no such thing as urgent free help.

I don't follow -- are you saying that mysql is giving you the correct results, but you just want to format to output differently?