Need help with a query

[jim.davidson]

I'm new to mySQL an could use some advice.

 

I have  a table "items", it has few thousand records.  I want to give the user an option to pick one from from a list by item name. 

 

To reduce the size of the list I would like to break it down alphabetically, say Aa-Am, An-Az, and so on.

 

My question is how to I write the query?

 

I'm thinking it's something like these

 

SELECT * FROM items  WHERE substr(description,0,2) < 'An' ORDER BY description ASC

 

SELECT * FROM items  WHERE substr(description,0,2) > 'Am' AND substr(description,0,2) < 'Ba' ORDER BY description ASC

 

Any help will be appreciated

[rhodesa]

For the second one, you should be able to use BETWEEN

 

SELECT * FROM items  WHERE substr(description,0,2) BETWEEN 'Am' AND 'Ba' ORDER BY description ASC