So I have this site and I need to print out a list of things that could have up to one thousand things in it in alphabetical order. I though that it might be a good idea do SELECT * table and then sort the rest out programmatically in PHP (I'm sure a for loop of some sort would sort it out). My dad said that it would possibly be more effeciant do do lots of SELECT * FROM table WHERE collumn LIKE 'A%' es for each letter. He says since it's blocked then there would be less of a slowdown at the beggining and there would be progressive loading. The table format I'm using is MyISAM whitch will lock the whole table whenever its written to, whitch happens fairly rarely.

Can anyone bring any insight into this?

Do the sort in MySQL with an ORDER BY clause ... that way you only need a single SQL enquiry, and you don't have a heavy chunk of traffic from the mysql daemon back to your PHP.

Say you had a table of rabbits (once you have two of them, you have a LOT) and wanted to ouput a list of them sorted alphabetically based on their mother's name, then:

select * from rabbits order by mumsname

and you get all the record back and very efficiently too already in the order you want.

---