Issue with arrays? Any experts?

[eluser]oddman[/eluser]
Yes, definitely faster - MUCH faster. Considering you're using cat in the where clause and it's a string - your indexes (if you have any defined), are string-based. Numerical indexes are a billion times faster (okay maybe not that much)

As for cleaning it up, it's possible to do what you want as part of a single query and/or store the data as a tree.