Mysql improve SELECT speed

Question

I'm currently trying to improve the speed of SELECTS for a MySQL table and would appreciate any suggestions on ways to improve it.

We have over 300 million records in the table and the table has the structure tag, date, value. The primary key is a combined key of tag and date. The table contains information for about 600 unique tags most containing an average of about 400,000 rows but can range from 2000 to over 11 million rows.

The queries run against the table are:

  SELECT date,
         value 
    FROM table 
   WHERE tag = "a" 
     AND date BETWEEN 'x' and 'y' 
ORDER BY date

....and there are very few if any INSERTS.

I have tried partitioning the data by tag into various number of partitions but this seems to have little increase in speed.

Answer 1

take time to read my answer here: (has similar volumes to yours)

500 millions rows, 15 million row range scan in 0.02 seconds.

MySQL and NoSQL: Help me to choose the right one

then amend your table engine to innodb as follows:

create table tag_date_value
(
tag_id smallint unsigned not null, -- i prefer ints to chars
tag_date datetime not null, -- can we make this date vs datetime ?
value int unsigned not null default 0, -- or whatever datatype you require
primary key (tag_id, tag_date) -- clustered composite PK
)
engine=innodb;

you might consider the following as the primary key instead:

primary key (tag_id, tag_date, value) -- added value save some I/O

but only if value isnt some LARGE varchar type !

query as before:

select
 tag_date, 
 value
from
 tag_date_value
where
 tag_id = 1 and
 tag_date between 'x' and 'y'
order by
 tag_date;

hope this helps :)

EDIT

oh forgot to mention - dont use alter table to change engine type from mysiam to innodb but rather dump the data out into csv files and re-import into a newly created and empty innodb table.

note i'm ordering the data during the export process - clustered indexes are the KEY !

Export

select * into outfile 'tag_dat_value_001.dat' 
fields terminated by '|' optionally enclosed by '"'
lines terminated by '\r\n'
from
 tag_date_value
where
 tag_id between 1 and 50
order by
 tag_id, tag_date;

select * into outfile 'tag_dat_value_002.dat' 
fields terminated by '|' optionally enclosed by '"'
lines terminated by '\r\n'
from
 tag_date_value
where
 tag_id between 51 and 100
order by
 tag_id, tag_date;

-- etc...

Import

import back into the table in correct order !

start transaction;

load data infile 'tag_dat_value_001.dat' 
into table tag_date_value
fields terminated by '|' optionally enclosed by '"'
lines terminated by '\r\n'
(
tag_id,
tag_date,
value
);

commit;

-- etc...

Answer 2

What is the cardinality of the date field (that is, how many different values appear in that field)? If the date BETWEEN 'x' AND 'y' is more limiting than the tag = 'a' part of the WHERE clause, try making your primary key (date, tag) instead of (tag, date), allowing date to be used as an indexed value.

Also, be careful how you specify 'x' and 'y' in your WHERE clause. There are some circumstances in which MySQL will cast each date field to match the non-date implied type of the values you compare to.