We’ve got a MySQL table in which rows are never updated, but instead new rows are added and the old ones marked obsolete. Think Rails’ acts_as_paranoid, but for every update.
To make working with Rails sane, we’ve got a view which selects only the rows which are “current”. That makes a much better “table” for our ActiveRecord model.
The snag: our indexes aren’t being used anymore.
Queries on the view don’t use the underlying tables’ indexes. You can’t add an index to a view. Without indexes, the app is unbearably slow.
The only solution we’ve come up with is to build a materialized view, but that’s a pain in MySQL because they’re not natively supported.
Is there a better way to do this?
Since MySQL executes the query underlying the view, it should still use the indexes on the query that composes the view. Do an explain on the query that you used to create the view and post here if it’s not indexing.