The Developer Day » sorting

MySQL – ORDER BY RAND() optimization

Žilvinas Šaltys — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:44:46 +0000

Interesting read about order by rand optimization by Jan Kneschke. Haven’t used this myself but seems might be rather useful. The performance difference is huge. I wonder if MySQL could optimize ORDER BY RAND() itself when there are no data holes.

MySQL Top N Sort Algorithm

Žilvinas Šaltys — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:29:46 +0000

While reading planetmysql I’ve found a very interesting article about Top N Sort algorithm. It would be nice to have this implemented in MySQL. There are millions of applications that have sorted and paginated lists of data. Some of those lists are really big. For example company that I work for has a web application with a report that has milions of rows and it has to be sorted and it only shows a few hundred rows in a single page. This would definitely be a great improvement to MySQL.

MySQL character sets and collations

Žilvinas Šaltys — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:05:39 +0000

Another great article I’ve found about MySQL character sets and collations that demystifies all the so often found problems in projects made by confused developers. This also can help you to save some space your database takes and improve your queries performance because more of your database can fit into memory.