Now, here's where we stand...

jonknee's query took about 25-27 seconds and returned 154 records.

b logica's query took about 6 seconds and returned 24 records

My original query takes 18 seconds and returns ALL records and is
exactly this:

SELECT CONCAT(`Contact`.`ln`, `Contact`.`fn`) AS `full_name`,
`Contact`.`id`, `Contact`.`created`, `Contact`.`modified`,
`Contact`.`fn`, `Contact`.`ln`, `Contact`.`co`, `Contact`.`email1`,
`Contact`.`phone_home`, `Address`.`line1`, `Address`.`line2`,
`Address`.`city`, `Address`.`st`, `Address`.`zip` FROM `contacts` AS
`Contact` LEFT JOIN `addresses` AS `Address` ON `Contact`.`id` =
`Address`.`contact_id` WHERE `Contact`.`ln` <> '' AND `Contact`.`fn`
<> '' AND `Contact`.`ln` IS NOT NULL AND `Contact`.`fn` IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY `Contact`.`ln` ASC, `Contact`.`fn` ASC

Then I store the results into an array and run this query:

SELECT * FROM `import_contacts` AS `ImportContact` ORDER BY `ln` ASC,
`fn` ASC

I store those results into an array, too, then I loop through the
ImportContact array looking for a matching key (PHP's array_key_exists
function). I can do this because I format the two result set arrays
using a concatenated string as the key of the array. For instance, a
record with a first name of "Mark" and last name of "Smith" gets
stored as:

array("MarkSmith" => array("field1" => "value1", "field2" =>
"value2"));

This is working great, it's just timing out my PHP script because it
can take 3+ minutes to execute the whole thing across the 30k records
I have :-/

On Mar 27, 5:44 pm, "Dardo Sordi Bogado" <dardoso...@gmail.com> wrote: