Alphabetical Grouping in MySQL/PHP

[geat]

I'm creating a glossary page that has the letters of the alphabet listed across the top, each being a bookmark that takes you to the relevant letter section on the page. If there are no entries for a letter in the DB, I don't want the letter to be a link.

At the moment, i do 26 SELECT LIKE statements (e.g. 'a%', 'b%', etc.) - and it works, but it's grossly ineffcient.

Can I do this in a single MySQL statement and then do the processing in PHP? I'm assuming there is some kind of GROUP BY syntax I can use?

[cosminb]

you can order all of the records in your data base and save them in a session variabile. and after that you could do anything you want with it

[Norman_Graham]

Try this: http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/SELECT.html and also this http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Group_by_functions.html.

Norm