This is the query that works on MS SQL server, but I can't get to work in MySQL:

SELECT ss, COUNT(DISTINCT ra) AS theCount
FROM (SELECT DISTINCT searchStr AS ss, remote_addr AS ra FROM tbl_savesearch) tb
GROUP BY ss
ORDER BY theCount DESC

table looks like this:

table tbl_savesearch
id, searchStr, remote_addr, was_answered

Tried to find an answer in the documentation, but the only thing I could find that is wrong is that mysql needs an "as" before the "tb" after the second inline query.

What do I need to change?

What was the error message?
Prior to version 4.1 MySQL does not support subselects.
select version();

ah, yes that seems to be the problem:

"[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver][mysqld-3.23.58]You have an error in your SQL syntax near..."

Is there some other way to get the same result?

This should do the same thing:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS tmp;
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE tmp
SELECT DISTINCT searchStr as ss, remote_addr as ra
FROM tbl_savesearch;

SELECT ss, COUNT(DISTINCT ra) AS theCount
FROM tmp
GROUP BY ss
ORDER BY theCount DESC;

DROP TABLE tmp;

Actually I couldn't get that to work either, this is the error message:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'

[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver][mysqld-3.23.58]You have an error in your SQL syntax near ';CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE tmp SELECT DISTINCT searchStr as ss, remote_addr as ra F' at line 1

I tried adding a semicolon after "create temporary table tmp" too, but that made no difference...

Try running all those SQL queries w/o the terminating semicolon (.

And run each of the four SQL queries in a separate ODBC statement (don't jam them all together in one ODBC statement).