Re: Best practices for using MySQL index

Shelley wrote:

Don't index just all integer fields. Keep track of the cardinality of a column. If you expect a field to have 100.000 records, but with only 500 distinct values it has no use to put an index on that column. A full record search is quicker.

Hmmm... That's new. :)

Well, to give you a good measure: keep the cardinality between 30 to 70-80 percent of your total records in a column. But sometimes your field is NULL or empty, so it really depends. You can't just put it into a standard configuration. And it also really depends on how many records a table contains etc. Besides that, benchmarking your development environment (you do have one do you?) can gives you a good idea on how your hardware and setup performs. Aschwin Wesselius