I eliminated your GROUP BY clause because you weren't actually GROUPing anything. You weren't looking for a MIN(), a MAX(), an AVG(), or anything else that GROUP BY was intended to be used for. That method of de-duplicating results will return potentially misleading information as it will randomly pick just one record from all of the records that fit within that "group". This way, by using DISTINCT, you can see if things change mid-flight or not (which is either an indication of bad data or some other troubles).
Ok, again I should have explained this. The reason why FlightData is so huge and growing so rapidly, is because we take a snapshot every minute of every single flight we monitor. I therefore group by a time stamp and/or FlightTracker (Depending what data I need), so that I can only get the data returned each time the data (plane's position) actually changed. A quick example:
mysql> SELECT * FROM FlightData LIMIT 2\G *************************** 1. row *************************** EntryID: 3471 Network: V TimeStamp: 2005-04-14 07:27:42 Tracker: df0363ea-fe06-1027-b1dd-00e01884a424 PilotCallSign: xxx PilotCID: xxx PilotRealName: Abdul Henderson KDFW CurHeading: 124 CurAlt: 34887 CurGS: 469 Plane: H/DC10/W Transponder: 7207 QNHHg: 29.80 QNHMb: 1009.14 Enroute: 06:00:00 Feul: 10:00:00 AirportDep: KLAX AirportDes: MMMX AirportAlt: PositionCur: 32.06073/-114.70269 PositionDep: 33.942536/-118.408075 PositionDes: 19.435278/-099.072222 PLGS: 480 PLAlt: 35000 PLDepTime: 640 PLFlightType: I *************************** 2. row *************************** EntryID: 3472 Network: V TimeStamp: 2005-04-14 07:37:42 Tracker: df0363ea-fe06-1027-b1dd-00e01884a424 PilotCallSign: xxx PilotCID: xxx PilotRealName: xxx CurHeading: 255 CurAlt: 35707 CurGS: 470 Plane: B738 Transponder: 7207 QNHHg: 29.96 QNHMb: 1014.56 Enroute: 02:12:00 Feul: 05:30:00 AirportDep: KPDX AirportDes: KLAX AirportAlt: PositionCur: 33.94045/-118.40567 PositionDep: 45.588722/-122.597500 PositionDes: 33.942536/-118.408075 PLGS: 350 PLAlt: 34000 PLDepTime: 220 PLFlightType: I 2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
FlightTracker therefore appears in the database a couple of hundred times for each flight. It is inserted each and every time we poll the flight, whether the data has changed or not. If I do not group therefore, my original query would return the Deparutre / Arrival for each and every occurance for FlightTracker. I do however understand what you are saying, and I was not aware that it would Group the GROUP / JOIN the entire table before adding the exceptions. This is obviously my problem as well.
Mainly, I use the TimeStamp to determine WHEN last the position of a flight was changed (and thus I know when and what change was made in the flight), whilst FlightTracker is used to "group" all the occurances of the changes in the flight.
> This command would fit between the CREATE...SELECT... and the second
SELECT... Even though the docs say that only 1 index is ever used per query, I believe that each JOIN can also make use of an index if it exists (this belief is based on the results of the EXPLAIN(s) of queries containing JOINed tables. However, I could be completely wrong in this belief.).
I was seriously hoping to be able to do this effeciently with one query. But what you are saying does make sense however - especially when the database gets bigger and we're sitting with 1GB of flight data for example. One question though, if we sit with (for example) with 1,000,000 records instead of the odd 350K records in the database now. Will it not take just as long to populate the temp table?
I do not think this technique is faster if you eliminate the WHERE clause from the first query. But if you do have a WHERE, it should return much faster than if you simply added a WHERE to your original query.
Ok. That is something that I was not sure about either yes. WHERE would obviously make the JOINs / GROUP BY smaller in regards to the amount of data examined and processed. I thought perhaps LIMIT would do the same, in that it would use only the 30 records specified in my example query. Obviously it JOIN / GROUP the entire table first, and only then return the first 30 records - which is indeed a big difference.
mysql> SELECT FlightData.PilotCallSign AS FLNum, FlightLogs.Tracker AS Tracker, FlightLogs.TimeStart AS TimeDep, Departure.IATA AS AirpDep, Arrival.IATA AS AirpDes, FlightLogs.Plane AS Plane FROM FlightLogs LEFT JOIN Airports AS Departure ON FlightLogs.AirpDep=Departure.ICAO LEFT JOIN Airports AS Arrival ON FlightLogs.AirpDes=Arrival.ICAO LEFT JOIN FlightData ON FlightLogs.Tracker=FlightData.Tracker GROUP BY FlightData.Tracker ORDER BY FlightLogs.TimeStart LIMIT 30;
+---------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+----------+
| FLNum | Tracker | TimeDep | AirpDep | AirpDes | Plane |
+---------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+----------+
<SNIP>
+---------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+----------+
30 rows in set (14.43 sec)
mysql> SELECT FlightData.PilotCallSign AS FLNum, FlightLogs.Tracker AS Tracker, FlightLogs.TimeStart AS TimeDep, Departure.IATA AS AirpDep, Arrival.IATA AS AirpDes, FlightLogs.Plane AS Plane FROM FlightLogs LEFT JOIN Airports AS Departure ON FlightLogs.AirpDep=Departure.ICAO LEFT JOIN Airports AS Arrival ON FlightLogs.AirpDes=Arrival.ICAO LEFT JOIN FlightData ON FlightLogs.Tracker=FlightData.Tracker WHERE FlightLogs.CCID='927968' GROUP BY FlightData.Tracker ORDER BY FlightLogs.TimeStart;
+--------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+--------+
| FLNum | Tracker | TimeDep | AirpDep | AirpDes | Plane |
+--------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+--------+
<SNIP>
+--------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+--------+
2 rows in set (0.02 sec)
MAJOR difference indeed ;) I'll check out the temp tables a bit later after I had some sleep. I think I'll need it for what I'm going to be exploring here... hehehe One last question... A sub select may not perhaps speed things up as well?
-- Chris.
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