I'm a little bit confused about what EXPLAIN is saying about a query I'm doing with an ORDER BY clause. I've read and re-read the parts of the manual about how ORDER BY is optimized, but it won't sink in to my thick skull for some reason.
I've got an index on a column called price, which is an INT: mysql> show columns from homes like 'price' \G *************************** 1. row *************************** Field: price Type: int(11) Null: YES Key: MUL Default: NULL Extra: 1 row in set (0.00 sec) which I frequently sort by. EXPLAIN says that a filesort is necessary to do this: mysql> explain select * from homes order by price \G *************************** 1. row *************************** table: homes type: ALL possible_keys: NULL key: NULL key_len: NULL ref: NULL rows: 3628 Extra: Using filesort 1 row in set (0.00 sec) even when I do an "ALTER TABLE homes ORDER BY price". Why is a filesort required to sort these rows? Is this something I should worry about as this system goes from 1500 queries/day to 15000 queries/day to 150000 queries/day? Is there something I can do that is faster? Sorry if this is a stupid question; this is the first database I've designed where I've had to put much thought into performance. Thanks for any info or pointers to documentation, -----ScottG. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php