[snip] > =others, eg MySQL, do not, and thus unless MySQL's last DELETE format > option > works sufficiently well, the best option might be two DELETE's: the first > per your suggestion above and the second to remove all entries in posts > that > no longer join to a topics row. But you can't join on a DELETE, either (in MySQL at least). So you're left with writing a whole PHP script to do it. Run a SELECT to get all of the topics with IDs older than two hours. Roll up all of those IDs into a comma separated list, like (1,2,3,4) etc. Then run two DELETE queries on each table. DELETE FROM topics WHERE id IN $id_string DELETE FROM posts WHERE topic IN $id_string Is there a better way to organize your data so this is all in one table?? Maybe just add another column to say whether the "message" is a topic or a post? Then your deletes could be done with single query, probably. ---John Holmes... -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php