I have been banging my head against the wall on this... I cannot get a
datediff statement to work. Even a copy and paste of the examples from
the manual for 5.0 doesn't work either.

Example:

mysql> SELECT DATEDIFF('1997-12-31 23:59:59','1997-12-30');
ERROR 1064 (00000): You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the
manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax
to use near '('1997-12-31 23:59:59','1997-12-30')' at line 1

Version of mysql:

mysql Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.16, for pc-linux-gnu (i686) using readline
5.0

Any ideas? Thanks,

- Chris