Hi GIJOE,

Thanks for your reply. Our production server is running MySQL 4.0.26 but I have tested the queries on 4.1 and 5.0. For some reason on 4.0 and 4.1 the optimizer uses the status index which is next to useless due to the low cardinality. If you include the "USE INDEX(date)" in the queries it will have no adverse affects on the servers which get it correct.

If you run an EXPLAIN on both versions of the query you will see what I mean.

Thanks for including the changes.