Other than running it to completion…
Is there some sort of progress you can monitor to see what operations are happening as your query is being processed that would give you a sense of how long it’s going to take, or at least what step it is on, what steps have happened, and which remain?
If yes, would this same tool help you identify the part of your query that is taking the longest?
I’m trying to get a better sense for what makes some queries take longer than others.
It’s called profiling : http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/using-new-query-profiler.html
MySQL has one built-in for you. : )