Question

Let’s say I have a table called PEOPLE having three columns, ID, LastName, and FirstName. None of these columns are indexed.
LastName is more unique, and FirstName is less unique.

If I do two searches:

select * from PEOPLE where FirstName="F" and LastName="L"
select * from PEOPLE where LastName="L" and FirstName="F"

My belief is the second one is faster because the more unique criterion (LastName) comes first in the where clause, and records will get eliminated more efficiently. I don’t think the optimizer is smart enough to optimize the first SQL query.

Is my understanding correct?

Answer 1

No, that order doesn’t matter (or at least: shouldn’t matter).

Any decent query optimizer will look at all the parts of the WHERE clause and figure out the most efficient way to satisfy that query.

I know the SQL Server query optimizer will pick a suitable index – no matter which order you have your two conditions in. I assume other RDBMS will have similar strategies.

What does matter is whether or not you have a suitable index for this!

In the case of SQL Server, it will likely use an index if you have:

• an index on (LastName, FirstName)
• an index on (FirstName, LastName)
• an index on just (LastName), or just (FirstName) (or both)

On the other hand – again for SQL Server – if you use SELECT * to grab all columns from a table, and the table is rather small, then there’s a good chance the query optimizer will just do a table (or clustered index) scan instead of using an index (because the lookup into the full data page to get all other columns just gets too expensive very quickly).