Ouch. MySQL has a major weakness - or - I am an idiot. (probably the latter).

When using joins with a sort order, it tends to fall back into filesort which is dreadfully slow, unless you can pull off some insanely complex query nesting.

One would think you could define the default sort order for a table and have MySQL alway optimize for that in queries.

Another headache is that MySQL.com doesn’t currently sport a 64-bit version for Intel Macs. Sigh.