Question

I have the following Table:

  CREATE TABLE `sal_forwarding` (
  `sid` BIGINT(20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `f_shop` INT(11) NOT NULL,
  `f_offer` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  .
  .
  .
  PRIMARY KEY (`sid`),
  KEY `forwardTime` (`forwardTime`,`f_shop`),
  KEY `forwardTime_2` (`forwardTime`),
  KEY `f_shop` (`f_shop`)
) ENGINE=INNODB AUTO_INCREMENT=10457068 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

This table has more than 5 million rows.

I’ve set indexes, as you can see above, but in my query no indexes are used and I don’t understand why. Does anybody see my problem?

Explain:

EXPLAIN SELECT 
  f_shop
  , COUNT(sid)
  , SUM(IF(toolbarUser=1,1,0)) 
FROM sal_forwarding 
WHERE DATE(forwardTime) = "2011-09-01" 
GROUP BY f_shop

Result:

+----+-------------+----------------+-------+---------------+--------+---------+--------+--------+-------------+
| ID | SELECT_TYPE |     TABLE      | TYPE  | POSSIBLE_KEYS |  KEY   | KEY_LEN |  REF   |  ROWS  |    EXTRA    |
+----+-------------+----------------+-------+---------------+--------+---------+--------+--------+-------------+
|    |             |                |       |               |        |         |        |        |             |
| 1  | SIMPLE      | sal_forwarding | index | (NULL)        | f_shop | 4       | (NULL) | 232449 | Using where |
+----+-------------+----------------+-------+---------------+--------+---------+--------+--------+-------------+

Answer 1

MySQL cannot use an index on a column inside a function.
Remove the function date() from your select and MySQL will use the index.

You can do this by changing your column definition of forwardtime to DATE
Or you can change the query like so

SELECT 
  f_shop
  , COUNT(*) as RowCount
  , SUM(toolbarUser=1) as NumberOfToolbarUsers
FROM sal_forwarding 
WHERE forwardTime BETWEEN '2011-09-01 00:00' AND '2011-09-01 23:59' 
GROUP BY f_shop

Remarks

• count(*) is faster than count(namedcolumn);
• (a=1) => 1 if true, (a=1) => 0 if false, so the if(a=1,1,0) can be shortened;
• It’s a good idea to alias your aggregate columns, so you can refer to them by their alias later.
• If you add the following index (and remove index forwardtime), you query will run even faster. KEY fasttime (forwardTime,f_shop,toolbarUser)
• The previous point is especially true on InnoDB where MySQL will use a covering index if possible, which means that it will never read the table itself to retrieve the data if it can find all it needs in the index.