Re: Is my hardware slow or is it MySQL performance?

[Brandon Bates]

It doesn't look like from the tabledef that you have an index on that column. Which means that MySQL MUST do a table scan (SLOW and about the same in ANY database system, including ORACLE, MSSQL, doesn't matter). When you have an index and you are querying col='xyz' or col LIKE 'zyx%' then the performance with an index is MASSIVE since it only has to scan the smaller INDEX file not the TABLE (even if all the rows in the table had the same value for some reason). However LIKE ='%xxx' with the wildcard at the beginning can't use an index so it table scans, so be aware. Also for large tables I found it helpful to have PACK_KEYS=1 in the tabledef since it helps eliminate the disk bottleneck on a large index file (depending on how fast your disks are, you might get CPU bound instead of DISK bound, so test it.) Your query should return in a few seconds or less.