I was dealing with a cryptic message of the followin:

[color=red]ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line 88: MySQL server has gone away[/color]

Apparently a SQL query *can* be too big and MySQL would just *gone away* …
[url=http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/packet-too-large.html]http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/packet-too-large.html[/url]

In case you have huge query like I do, change the my.ini file to allow bigger query is a very good idea.

[code]my.ini
[mysqld]
max_allowed_packet=32M
[/code]