I have a table in a MySQL database that I need to optimise the speed of searching on.

It looks like gmax nailed your specific question, so I'll toss in a bit of general advice. For playing in the SQL optimization sandbox, I've found Gulutzan and Pelzer's SQL Performance Tuning to be quite useful. It discusses the general theory of how RDBMSs work under the covers (including details on cost-based query optimization and the performance characteristics of various table implementations), then contrasts how 8 different RDMBSes (including MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server) respond to various query adjustments and optimizations. It's great fodder for reasoning through performance problems.

In reply to Re: MySQL Select Speed Optimisation by dws
in thread MySQL Select Speed Optimisation by tachyon

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.