Question

I’m not very good at MySQL and i’m going to write a query to count messages sent by an user, based on its type and is_auto field.

Messages can be of type “small text message” or “newsletter”. I created two entities with a few fields that differs between them. The important one is messages_count that is absent in table newsletter and it’s used in the query:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `small_text_message` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `messages_count` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `username` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `method` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `content` longtext,
  `sent_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `status` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `recipients_count` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `customers_count` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `sheduled_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `sheduled_for` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `is_auto` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
  `user_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

And:

CREATE TABLE `newsletter` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `subject` varchar(78) DEFAULT NULL,
  `content` longtext,
  `sent_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `status` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `recipients_count` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `customers_count` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `sheduled_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `sheduled_for` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `is_auto` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
  `user_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

I ended up with a UNION query. Can this query be shortened or optimized since the only difference is messages_count that should be always 1 for newsletter?

SELECT
CONCAT('sms_', IF(is_auto = 0, 'user' , 'auto')) AS subtype,
SUM(messages_count * (customers_count + recipients_count)) AS count
FROM small_text_message WHERE status <> 'pending' AND user_id = 1
GROUP BY is_auto
UNION
SELECT
CONCAT('newsletter_', IF(is_auto = 0, 'user' , 'auto')) AS subtype,
SUM(customers_count + recipients_count) AS count
FROM newsletter WHERE status <> 'pending' AND user_id = 1
GROUP BY is_auto

Answer 1

I don’t see any easy way to avoid a UNION (or UNION ALL) operation, that will return the specified result set.

I would recommend you use a UNION ALL operator in place of the UNION operator. Then the execution plan will not include the step that eliminates duplicate rows. (You already have GROUP BY operations on each query, and there is no way that those two queries can produce an identical row.)

Otherwise, your query looks fine just as it is written.

(It’s always a good thing to consider the question, might there be a better way? To get the result set you are asking for, from the schema you have, your query looks about as good as it’s going to get.)