Note: this isint related to my other thread.<BR><BR>Hey<BR><BR>Im writing a php app to collect statistics about our platform. I have about 40 different count(*) querys to run against a mysql database.

I have a table that logs a record containing a userid, a fileid and a date, one record inserted every time that file is downloaded.<BR><BR>I want to get the top 10 downloads by count for a given date ...

A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...