Question

I have a 10M-row table product with fields like color (int), price (float), weight (float), unitprice (int), etc … Now users from Web dynamically generate queries to lookup data from this table with random conditions (color is a must have here) and order-by such as

select * from product where color=1 and price >5 and price <220 and .... order by unitprice limit 75, 25;

select count(*) from product where color=3 and weight <500 and price <30 ... ;

How to index a table (InnoDB or NDB) with about 10 possible filtering fields (with range, sorting …) like this in MySQL?

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EDIT: In my understanding MySQL most likely will pick only one index for a query, and only the left hand part of a composite index will work. Obviously indexing all possible combinations is not a feasible option, such as (color, price, weight, create_date, unitprice, ....), (color, weight, price, create_date, unitprice, ....), (color, unitprice, weight, ....) …. Not all conditions are necessarily present in all queries.

What would you do to index this table?

Answer 1

If you want quick lookups/filters/sorts on any field, you must put indexes on all of them.

If color ist a must have (i.e. used in every query), it’s best to make composite indexes on (color, field) for each field you have.

Putting the clustered index over (color, product_id) might also be worth a try if color really is a part of every common query.