Help with SELECT statement

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
[quote author="Samuurai" date="1248727669"]
There's a lot of short-hand in there though... why do you select t.* Does create some sort of alias?[/quote]

For readability, particularly until you get the hang of things you might want to avoid those shorthands. Even now I tend to avoid them unless I'm writing an especially wordy query.

Consider this segment of bgreene's statement:

select t.*,a.name as appname,d.name as devname from downtime t

The 'downtime t' at the end is where it's aliased, and there's a good case to be made for consistently using AS (even though it's technically optional, at least with MySQL). So I'd write downtime AS t there. I also upper-case all my reserved words, which I think further aids readability.