MySQL “IN” operator performance on (large?) number of values

Question

I have been experimenting with Redis and MongoDB lately and it would seem that there are often cases where you would store an array of id\'s in either Mongo

Answer 1

I have been doing some tests, and as David Fells says in his answer, it is quite well optimized. As a reference, I have created an InnoDB table with 1,000,000 registers and doing a select with the "IN" operator with 500,000 random numbers, it takes only 2.5 seconds on my MAC; selecting only the even registers takes 0.5 seconds.

The only problem that I had is that I had to increase the max_allowed_packet parameter from the my.cnf file. If not, a mysterious “MYSQL has gone away” error is generated.

Here is the PHP code that I use to make the test:

$NROWS =1000000;
$SELECTED = 50;
$NROWSINSERT =15000;

$dsn="mysql:host=localhost;port=8889;dbname=testschema";
$pdo = new PDO($dsn, "root", "root");
$pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);

$pdo->exec("drop table if exists `uniclau`.`testtable`");
$pdo->exec("CREATE  TABLE `testtable` (
        `id` INT NOT NULL ,
        `text` VARCHAR(45) NULL ,
        PRIMARY KEY (`id`) )");

$before = microtime(true);

$Values='';
$SelValues='(';
$c=0;
for ($i=0; $i<$NROWS; $i++) {
    $r = rand(0,99);
    if ($c>0) $Values .= ",";
    $Values .= "( $i , 'This is value $i and r= $r')";
    if ($r<$SELECTED) {
        if ($SelValues!="(") $SelValues .= ",";
        $SelValues .= $i;
    }
    $c++;

    if (($c==100)||(($i==$NROWS-1)&&($c>0))) {
        $pdo->exec("INSERT INTO `testtable` VALUES $Values");
        $Values = "";
        $c=0;
    }
}
$SelValues .=')';
echo "
";


$after = microtime(true);
echo "Insert execution time =" . ($after-$before) . "s
";

$before = microtime(true);  
$sql = "SELECT count(*) FROM `testtable` WHERE id IN $SelValues";
$result = $pdo->prepare($sql);  
$after = microtime(true);
echo "Prepare execution time =" . ($after-$before) . "s
";

$before = microtime(true);

$result->execute();
$c = $result->fetchColumn();

$after = microtime(true);
echo "Random selection = $c Time execution time =" . ($after-$before) . "s
";



$before = microtime(true);

$sql = "SELECT count(*) FROM `testtable` WHERE id %2 = 1";
$result = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$result->execute();
$c = $result->fetchColumn();

$after = microtime(true);
echo "Pairs = $c Exdcution time=" . ($after-$before) . "s
";

And the results:

Insert execution time =35.2927210331s
Prepare execution time =0.0161771774292s
Random selection = 499102 Time execution time =2.40285992622s
Pairs = 500000 Exdcution time=0.465420007706s