SQL Performance Tips

Specific Query Performance Tips

1. Use EXPLAIN to profile the query execution plan
2. Use Slow Query Log 
3. Don't use DISTINCT when you have or could use GROUP BY
4. Insert performance
   1. Batch INSERT and REPLACE
   2. Use LOAD DATA instead of INSERT
5. LIMIT m,n may not be as fast as it sounds. Learn how to improve it and read more about Efficient Pagination Using MySQL
6. Don't use ORDER BY RAND() if you have > ~2K records
7. Use SQL_NO_CACHE when you are SELECTing frequently updated data or large sets of data
8. Avoid wildcards at the start of LIKE queries
9. Avoid correlated subqueries and in select and where clause (try to avoid in)
10. No calculated comparisons -- isolate indexed columns
11. ORDER BY and LIMIT work best with equalities and covered indexes
12. Separate text/blobs from metadata, don't put text/blobs in results if you don't need them
13. Derived tables (subqueries in the FROM clause) can be useful for retrieving BLOBs without sorting them. (Self-join can speed up a query if 1st part finds the IDs and uses then to fetch the rest)
14. ALTER TABLE...ORDER BY can take data sorted chronologically and re-order it by a different field -- this can make queries on that field run faster (maybe this goes in indexing?)
15. Know when to split a complex query and join smaller ones
16. Delete small amounts at a time if you can
17. Make similar queries consistent so cache is used
18. Have good SQL query standards
19. Don't use deprecated features
20. Turning OR on multiple index fields (<5.0) into UNION may speed things up (with LIMIT), after 5.0 the index_merge should pick stuff up.
21. Don't use COUNT * on Innodb tables for every search, do it a few times and/or summary tables, or if you need it for the total # of rows, use SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
22. Use INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY update (INSERT IGNORE) to avoid having to SELECT
23. use groupwise maximum instead of subqueries
24. Avoid using IN(...) when selecting on indexed fields, It will kill the performance of SELECT query.
25. Prefer using UNION ALL if you don't need to merge the resul

  Posted By : Mr. Joydeep Das