Re: how to prevent duplicate rows but allow duplicate column entries

[laptop alias]

The key can actually be 1000 bytes.

So maybe you could use a separate field for your PRIMARY KEY, and then guarantee uniqueness on only the first 333 bytes of each field like so:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `names`;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `names` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`fname` text NOT NULL,
`mname` text NOT NULL,
`lname` text NOT NULL,
`rank` int(11) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
UNIQUE KEY `name` (`fname`(333),`mname`(333),`lname`(333))
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=11 ;