CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mysqlmariadbquery-optimization
William Entriken
William Entriken

Reputation: 39303

Is it wrong to move part of your WHERE clause to a HAVING clause if it runs faster?

In my long, complicated query that is not using aggregation, I have moved one of the ANDed where clause parts to a new HAVING clause.

Logically, the result is the same, rows are filtered before returned.

Semantically, the result may be different in some way I don't understand.

But performance-wise, this runs 3x faster. I understand this is because the thing I moved is doing an expensive NOT EXISTS (SELECT ...). Previously the server was spending time evaluating this for rows that could be excluded using the other simpler rules.

Are there any official or unofficial rules I have broken with this optimization approach?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 29

Answers (2)

Rick James
Rick James

Reputation: 142366

  • The order of WHERE clauses ANDed together --> The optimizer if free to rearrange, however
  • There are some exceptions: FULLTEXT search first; subqueries last. (I am not sure of this.)
  • Referencing aggregations --> must be in HAVING
  • Otherwise WHERE and HAVING have the same semantics.
  • WHERE is logically done before GROUP BY; HAVING is done after.
  • It seems that you have discovered that NOT EXISTS is more efficient if it is somehow forced to come after other tests; and moving it to HAVING seems to have achieved that.

Submit a bug report (jira.mariadb.com) suggesting that you have found a case where the Optimizer is not juggling them the clauses as well as it should.

If you show us the actual query, we might be able to dig deeper.

Upvotes: 0

nbk
nbk

Reputation: 49385

no there are no rules as such.

As the joins come before the WHERE clause, you would reduce the number of rows, that will be checked against the WHERE clause.

It is usually somewhat fawned upon, because you could miss some rows that are needed.

So basically you can do it, but have to check , if all wanted rows are there.

Upvotes: 1

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