Question

I’ve got a very large table (~100Million Records) in MySQL that contains information about files. One of the pieces of information is the modified date of each file.

I need to write a query that will count the number of files that fit into specified date ranges. To do that I made a small table that specifies these ranges (all in days) and looks like this:

DateRanges
range_id   range_name   range_start   range_end
1          0-90         0             90
2          91-180       91            180
3          181-365      181           365
4          366-1095     366           1095
5          1096+        1096          999999999

And wrote a query that looks like this:

SELECT r.range_name, sum(IF((DATEDIFF(CURDATE(),t.file_last_access) > r.range_start and DATEDIFF(CURDATE(),t.file_last_access) < r.range_end),1,0)) as FileCount
FROM `DateRanges` r, `HugeFileTable` t
GROUP BY r.range_name

However, quite predictably, this query takes forever to run. I think that is because I am asking MySQL to go through the HugeFileTable 5 times, each time performing the DATEDIFF() calculation on each file.

What I want to do instead is to go through the HugeFileTable record by record only once, and for each file increment the count in the appropriate range_name running total. I can’t figure out how to do that….

Can anyone help out with this?

Thanks.

EDIT: MySQL Version: 5.0.45, Tables are MyISAM

EDIT2: Here’s the descibe that was asked for in the comments

id  select_type  table  type  possible_keys  key  key_len  ref  rows      Extra  
1   SIMPLE       r      ALL   NULL           NULL NULL     NULL 5         Using temporary; Using filesort 
1   SIMPLE       t      ALL   NULL           NULL NULL     NULL 96506321   

Answer 1

First, create an index on HugeFileTable.file_last_access.

Then try the following query:

SELECT r.range_name, COUNT(t.file_last_access) as FileCount
FROM `DateRanges` r
 JOIN `HugeFileTable` t 
 ON (t.file_last_access BETWEEN 
   CURDATE() + INTERVAL r.range_start DAY AND 
   CURDATE() + INTERVAL r.range_end DAY)
GROUP BY r.range_name;

Here’s the EXPLAIN plan that I got when I tried this query on MySQL 5.0.75 (edited down for brevity):

+-------+-------+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| table | type  | key              | Extra                                        |
+-------+-------+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| t     | index | file_last_access | Using index; Using temporary; Using filesort | 
| r     | ALL   | NULL             | Using where                                  | 
+-------+-------+------------------+----------------------------------------------+

It’s still not going to perform very well. By using GROUP BY, the query incurs a temporary table, which may be expensive. Not much you can do about that.

But at least this query eliminates the Cartesian product that you had in your original query.

---

update: Here’s another query that uses a correlated subquery but I have eliminated the GROUP BY.

SELECT r.range_name,
  (SELECT COUNT(*) 
   FROM `HugeFileTable` t 
   WHERE t.file_last_access BETWEEN 
     CURDATE() - INTERVAL r.range_end DAY AND 
     CURDATE() - INTERVAL r.range_start DAY
  ) as FileCount
FROM `DateRanges` r;

The EXPLAIN plan shows no temporary table or filesort (at least with the trivial amount of rows I have in my test tables):

+----+--------------------+-------+-------+------------------+--------------------------+
| id | select_type        | table | type  | key              | Extra                    |
+----+--------------------+-------+-------+------------------+--------------------------+
|  1 | PRIMARY            | r     | ALL   | NULL             |                          | 
|  2 | DEPENDENT SUBQUERY | t     | index | file_last_access | Using where; Using index | 
+----+--------------------+-------+-------+------------------+--------------------------+

Try this query on your data set and see if it performs better.