Need some advice on a query

[jimdavidson]

I'm new to mySQL an could use some advice.

I have a table "items", it has few thousand records. I want to give the user an option to pick one from from a list
by item name. To reduce the size of the list I would like to break it down alphabetically, say Aa-Am, An-Az, and so on.

My question is how to I write the query?

I'm thinking it's something like these

SELECT * FROM items WHERE substr(description,0,2) < 'An' ORDER BY description ASC

SELECT * FROM items WHERE substr(description,0,2) > 'Am' AND substr(description,0,2) < 'Ba' ORDER BY description ASC

Any help will be appreciated

[jimdavidson]

Never mind I found out what I was doing wrong

should be

SELECT * FROM items WHERE substr(description,1,2) < 'An' ORDER BY description ASC

SELECT * FROM items WHERE substr(description,1,2) > 'Am' AND substr(description,1,2) < 'Ba' ORDER BY description ASC