Wednesday, October 01, 2014

MySQL Date Comparison Performance

As the webmaster of a major IT solutions provider, one of my responsibilities involves optimizing queries against our MySQL database in order to ensure fast page loads. Like most programming languages and technologies, there are often multiple ways to perform a certain action or get a certain result, but only a few of those possible approaches are efficient. MySQL is no exception. Hundreds of articles exist that compare the performance of different query strategies. However, not all scenarios have been exhausted yet. Today, I will be examining one of those scenarios: range comparisons against columns of the DATE datatype in InnoDB.