workblog » MySQL

Troubleshooting Slow MySQL Queries

Ian — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:33:01 +0000

Ian Gilfillan’s article on using indexes in MySQL has a good explanation of how to use the EXPLAIN statement to analyze a query, and what to look out for. You can also check out Jesse Farmer’s optimization tips for a primer on more advanced techniques.

Natural Sorting for MySQL

Ian — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:38:02 +0000

MySQL doesn’t provide a way to perform natural sorting on a string, so if you have numbers in your data you may get results like this

Product 110
Product 120
Product 13
Product 140

There are a lot of hacks available, but all of the ones I’ve seen only work in specific circumstances. The only comprehensive solution I found to do the sorting in MySQL is Drupal’s natsort module. You don’t need to be running Drupal to use it, just issue the queries that create the function and it’s dependencies, and you can then call it in your regular queries. But, it requires MySQL 5, so if you’re working on an older server and your data doesn’t work with one of the hacks, then you’ll probably just have to do the natural sorting in your scripting language, using something like PHP’s natsort().

Passing dates and times between PHP and MySQL

Ian — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:59:35 +0000

Richard Lord wrote a good article explaining the various ways of handling dates and times with PHP and MySQL.