I need to know if anyone knows how to search a database and sort out entries by name age etc

for example:
these three entries are entered into the table
Alex-14
Jim-15
zach-19
Aaron-15
now say i wanted to search and be able to find all users that begin with the letter A. i would click the letter A then only Alex and Aaron would come up

do you guys understand or do you need more info.

Also i need to know a very simple way of making a private message system

is this a SQL problem or an application problem

at first glance the SQL is pretty trivial

select my,column,list from mytable where mynamecolumn like "A$"

an alternative would be
select my,column,list from mytable where left(mynamecolumn,1,1) = "A"

however youmention you want to click on a letter, so that means your problem also relates to how you access your data (the front end, the user interface), and yyou give no clues as to what front end you are usign
it could be a web page a more traditional user interface (such as VB, VC, C#,.NET, Java)

if its a web page then you may want to look at AJAX on a PHP script

healdem, mysql uses the standard percent sign as its wildcard character for LIKE, not the dollar sign



you'll need three tables -- users, messages, recipients

the users table contains one row for each user

the messages table contains one row for each message, with a foreign key to the user who sent it

the recipients table contains one row for each recipient of each message, with foreign keys to the message and to the user who is the recipient

that should get you started

oops my bad....

sorry the $ was a typo, as ignorant as I am in SQL,even I knew % is the MySQL wildcard