newbie

Hello, As the subject states I am a PHP newbie. Our PHP guy left us and now I have to learn. Got some good books but I must be slow because I am still not getting it. Anyway, heres the deal. I have PHP3 and MySQL running on Red Hat. For the purpose of learning. I have created a db named ras_numbers. This db contains a table named ras_local. This table contains the fields ras_city, ras_areacode, ras_prefix, and ras_suffix. I have populated this db with our local access numbers. I have created a form that ask for the 3 digit prefix of a phone number and pass the variable prefix to a php file named do_prefix.php3. I can then run a Select statement --- $query = mysql_db_query($dbname, "SELECT ras_city, ras_areacode, ras_prefix, ras_suffix FROM ras_local Where ras_prefix = $prefix")or die(mysql_error()); If there is a match I can display the record. However, if there is not a match I would like it to preform another query that does a select *. I guess this would be accomplished using an IF then statement. But any I try cause the server to spike to 99% CPU utilization and stay that way until I kill the process. Any thoughts? Thanks, John Black