Cheers guys,
I used this mornings suggestion as it performed better than my attempts from the previous thread.
I tweaked the billing order around a bit but the query is all coming back in the 0.1# secs range directly on mysql and in the plugin its successful as well.
I do think I'll need to try something else for the SongsArtists one as well since thats large like the other thread also suggests.
Thanks for the support as always.
http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=1143.msg9590#msg9590James came up with a good query this morning that may work better for you:
SELECT distinct idActor, strActor from actors WHERE idActor IN (select idActor from actorlinkmovie WHERE iOrder < 2)
This will create a list with the top 2 billed actors in your movies. We've also removed the "sort by", which really isn't necessary at all and may have contributed to your problem.
Try with this, and if it works well, you could consider increasing the iOrder number to include, say, the top 4 billed actors or so.