I found this to be entertaining:

http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/archives/000967.html

especially after having had a rough day myself with Mysql. Basically, I need to take one big gob of data, and mix it in with some other data. I’m ok with SQL – not great – but know exactly how to accomplish what I need to do with SQL (PostgreSQL, in particular). Unfortunately, the Mysql version that I’m dealing with is old, out of date, and is some kind of ugly inbred cousing of SQL. No subqueries, no unions, intersections… blocked every way I turn! Ok, you have joins, but it’s not exactly what I wanted. I got a query that looked good, launched it and… poof, an error! Well, ok, I’ll try again. NO YOU WON’T, because the guy who put this house of cards together used MyISAM tables and so the big insert failed halfway through and didn’t ROLLBACK, like real databases do. So I had to find a way to reverse it myself, and then try again.

I hope I can sheperd this operation along long enough to migrate to PostgreSQL without having a nervous breakdown first.