Question

Table 1: Tracks

Table 2: Wordlist

Table 3: N:M Track has Words (trackwords)

Find all tracks which have all the words.

currently the query looks like:

SELECT DISTINCT t.id FROM track as t
Left Join trackwords as tw ON t.id=tw.trackid
Left Join wordlist as wl on wl.id=tw.wordid
WHERE 
wl.trackusecount>0 
group by t.id
HAVING SUM(IF(wl.word IN ('folsom','prison','blues'),1,0)) = 3;

Which according to EXPLAIN is using all indexes neccessary:

+----+-------------+-------+--------+-----------------------+---------+---------+----------------+---------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table | type   | possible_keys         | key     | key_len | ref            | rows    | Extra       |
+----+-------------+-------+--------+-----------------------+---------+---------+----------------+---------+-------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | t     | index  | PRIMARY               | PRIMARY | 4       | NULL           | 8194507 | Using index | 
|  1 | SIMPLE      | tw    | ref    | wordid,trackid        | trackid | 4       | mbdb.t.id      |       3 | Using where | 
|  1 | SIMPLE      | wl    | eq_ref | PRIMARY,trackusecount | PRIMARY | 4       | mbdb.tw.wordid |       1 | Using where | 
+----+-------------+-------+--------+-----------------------+---------+---------+----------------+---------+-------------+

But the query takes ages.
Any suggestion to speedup the query?

Answer 1

Your problem set is very much like that of storing tags for an item like StackOverflow or Del.icio.us does.

The article Tags: Database schemas proposes several solutions, among them @ChssPly76’s idea.