Re: myisamchk sorting records descending

[Ulf Wendel]

James Day wrote:
> Might: ALTER TABLE ... ORDER BY column DESC. Don't
> know if DESC is supported.

As Ingo said: there's no need to support it from a performance standpoint, although MySQL does support the sort order option.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/create-index.html

MySQL is clever enough to traverse B-tree indexes in any order, no matter how they are sorted. MySQL can traverse ascending indexes in descending order and descending indexes in ascending order. MySQL does not have the most fancy optimizer on the market, but it has some clever details, check the manual.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/order-by-optimization.html

By the way, the same applies for recent versions of MaxDB.

Ulf