MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

Name

PER-02: Carefully create the best set of indexes for your application

Synopsis

The primary purpose of indexes is to allow MySQL to rapidly retrieve the information you need. Just as the index in this book allows you to find some information without having to read the entire book, an index allows MySQL to get rows from the table without reading the entire table.

Determining the optimal set of indexes for your application is, therefore, probably the single most important step you can take to optimize MySQL stored program performance. In general, you should create indexes that support WHERE clause conditions and joins. You should also create multicolumn (concatenated) indexes, so that a single index can support all of the columns in the WHERE clause or all of the columns required to join two tables.

You should create indexes to support joins, since without an appropriate index, joins will degrade rapidly as the row counts in the involved tables increase.