1. To assist in analyzing slow SELECTs, please provide
* SHOW CREATE TABLE tbl\G -- engine, indexes (much better than DESCRIBE)
* SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'tbl'\G -- sizes
* EXPLAIN SELECT ...\G -- clues of inefficiencies
* SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%buffer%'; -- cache size
and surround them with [ code ] and [ / code ]
2. Read about Summary tables for significantly speeding up reports of time-based data...
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,372008 (Index performance)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,364300 (Thinking about sorting articles..)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?52,359476 (Slow 'sending data' phase on mySQL query, for simple query)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,355548 (views, unions and different dbs)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?106,288561 (Partitioning with range(to_days) issue)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,298557 (UNIX_TIMESTAMP Duplicate key)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?20,294180 (Multiple complex queries)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?125,287739 (Large table designissue)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,282768 (Which storage engine?)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,276359 (should i go with myisam or innodb?)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?125,266570 (Best way to store/access large amounts of data?)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,263259 (Slow JOIN to convert IP to Country Code)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,263071 (Bitmap Index)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,253221 (InnoDB CPU Spikes)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,254332 (Very long query doubt... (Monster query...))
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?125,252723 (Database Design for huge set of data)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,252593 (Counters)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?21,247124 (Solving table locking issues)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,247779 (compressing tables)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?125,245133 (Design approach for summary table by 3 items)
3. Don't use LIKE when = will do:
AND `method` LIKE 'update'
AND `method` = 'update'
4. Best index for this
WHERE `data_point_source_id` =1
AND `method` = 'update'
ORDER BY `populated` DESC
is either of these:
INDEX(data_point_source_id, method, populated)
INDEX(method, data_point_source_id, populated)