Question

I have about 1 million rows so its going pretty slow. Here’s the query:

$sql = "SELECT `plays`,`year`,`month` FROM `game`";

I’ve looked up indexes but it only makes sense to me when there’s a ‘where’ clause.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Indexes can make a difference even without a WHERE clause depending on what other columns you have in your table. If the 3 columns you are selecting only make up a small proportion of the table contents a covering index on them could reduce the amount of pages that need to be scanned.

Not moving as much data around though, either by adding a WHERE clause or doing the processing in the database would be better if possible.