To those who have been so helpful: I did manage to subscribe to a mysql mailing list. thanks for the pointers. As for my orig problem - for those who are intereseted: The FIELD function apparently doesn't work in 5.0.2, even tho it is in the online ref manual. I was given a suggestion of using INSTR and that worked beautifully. Here's how it looked in my Select statement: $q = "SELECT race_winner,count(race_date) as wins, SUBSTR(race_winner,INSTR(race_winner,' ')+1) as last_name FROM `trk_races` WHERE race_winner IS NOT NULL GROUP BY race_winner ORDER BY wins DESC,last_name"; It works just as I wanted it to. Thanks to all. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php