MySQL ORDER BY columns across multiple joined tables - mysql

Question

I have a database which consists of three tables, with the following structure:
restaurant table: restaurant_id, location_id, rating. Example: 1325, 77, 4.5
restaurant_name table: restaurant_id, language, name. Example: 1325, 'en', 'Pizza Express'
location_name table: location_id, language, name. Example: 77, 'en', 'New York'
I would like to get the restaurant info in English, sorted by location name and restaurant name, and use the LIMIT clause to paginate the result. So my SQL is:
SELECT ln.name, rn.name
FROM restaurant r
INNER JOIN location_name ln
ON r.location_id = ln.location_id
AND ln.language = 'en'
INNER JOIN restaurant_name rn
ON r.restaurant_id = rn.restaurant_id
AND rn.language = 'en'
ORDER BY ln.name, rn.name
LIMIT 0, 50
This is terribly slow - so I refined my SQL with deferred JOIN, which make things a lot faster (from over 10 seconds to 2 seconds):
SELECT ln.name, rn.name
FROM restaurant r
INNER JOIN (
SELECT r.restaurant_id
FROM restaurant r
INNER JOIN location_name ln
ON r.location_id = ln.location_id
AND ln.language = 'en'
INNER JOIN restaurant_name rn
ON r.restaurant_id = rn.restaurant_id
AND rn.language = 'en'
ORDER BY ln.name, rn.name
LIMIT 0, 50
) r1
ON r.restaurant_id = r1.restaurant_id
INNER JOIN location_name ln
ON r.location_id = ln.location_id
AND ln.language = 'en'
INNER JOIN restaurant_name rn
ON r.restaurant_id = rn.restaurant_id
AND rn.language = 'en'
ORDER BY ln.name, rn.name
2 seconds is unfortunately still not very acceptable to the user, so I go and check the EXPLAIN of the my query, and it appears that the slow part is on the ORDER BY clause, which I see "Using temporary; Using filesort". I checked the official reference manual about ORDER BY optimization and I come across this statement:
In some cases, MySQL cannot use indexes to resolve the ORDER BY,
although it may still use indexes to find the rows that match the
WHERE clause. Examples:
The query joins many tables, and the columns in the ORDER BY are not
all from the first nonconstant table that is used to retrieve rows.
(This is the first table in the EXPLAIN output that does not have a
const join type.)
So for my case, given that the two columns I'm ordering by are from the nonconstant joined tables, index cannot be used. My question is, is there any other approach I can take to speed things up, or what I've done so far is already the best I can achieve?
Thanks in advance for your help!
EDIT 1
Below is the EXPLAIN output with the ORDER BY clause:
+----+-------------+------------+--------+--------------------------+-----------------------+---------+--------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+------------+--------+--------------------------+-----------------------+---------+--------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
| 1 | PRIMARY | <derived2> | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 50 | |
| 1 | PRIMARY | rn | ref | idx_restaurant_name_1 | idx_restaurant_name_1 | 1538 | r1.restaurant_id,const,const | 1 | Using where |
| 1 | PRIMARY | r | eq_ref | PRIMARY,idx_restaurant_1 | PRIMARY | 4 | r1.restaurant_id | 1 | |
| 1 | PRIMARY | ln | ref | idx_location_name_1 | idx_location_name_1 | 1538 | test.r.location_id,const,const | 1 | Using where |
| 2 | DERIVED | rn | ALL | idx_restaurant_name_1 | NULL | NULL | NULL | 8484 | Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort |
| 2 | DERIVED | r | eq_ref | PRIMARY,idx_restaurant_1 | PRIMARY | 4 | test.rn.restaurant_id | 1 | |
| 2 | DERIVED | ln | ref | idx_location_name_1 | idx_location_name_1 | 1538 | test.r.location_id | 1 | Using where |
+----+-------------+------------+--------+--------------------------+-----------------------+---------+--------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
Below is the EXPLAIN output without the ORDER BY clause:
+----+-------------+------------+--------+--------------------------+-----------------------+---------+--------------------------------+------+--------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+------------+--------+--------------------------+-----------------------+---------+--------------------------------+------+--------------------------+
| 1 | PRIMARY | <derived2> | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 50 | |
| 1 | PRIMARY | rn | ref | idx_restaurant_name_1 | idx_restaurant_name_1 | 1538 | r1.restaurant_id,const,const | 1 | Using where |
| 1 | PRIMARY | r | eq_ref | PRIMARY,idx_restaurant_1 | PRIMARY | 4 | r1.restaurant_id | 1 | |
| 1 | PRIMARY | ln | ref | idx_location_name_1 | idx_location_name_1 | 1538 | test.r.location_id,const,const | 1 | Using where |
| 2 | DERIVED | rn | index | idx_restaurant_name_1 | idx_restaurant_name_1 | 1538 | NULL | 8484 | Using where; Using index |
| 2 | DERIVED | r | eq_ref | PRIMARY,idx_restaurant_1 | PRIMARY | 4 | test.rn.restaurant_id | 1 | |
| 2 | DERIVED | ln | ref | idx_location_name_1 | idx_location_name_1 | 1538 | test.r.location_id | 1 | Using where; Using index |
+----+-------------+------------+--------+--------------------------+-----------------------+---------+--------------------------------+------+--------------------------+
EDIT 2
Below are the DDL of the table. I built them for illustrating this problem only, the real table has much more columns.
CREATE TABLE restaurant (
restaurant_id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
location_id INT NOT NULL,
rating INT NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (restaurant_id),
INDEX idx_restaurant_1 (location_id)
);
CREATE TABLE restaurant_name (
restaurant_id INT NOT NULL,
language VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
INDEX idx_restaurant_name_1 (restaurant_id, language),
INDEX idx_restaurant_name_2 (name)
);
CREATE TABLE location_name (
location_id INT NOT NULL,
language VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
INDEX idx_location_name_1 (location_id, language),
INDEX idx_location_name_2 (name)
);

Answer 1

Based on the EXPLAIN numbers, there could be about 170 "pages" of restaurants (8484/50)? I suggest that that is impractical for paging through. I strongly recommend you rethink the UI. In doing so, the performance problem you state will probably vanish.
For example, the UI could be 2 steps instead of 170 to get to the restaurants in Zimbabwe. Step 1, pick a country. (OK, that might be page 5 of the countries.) Step 2, view the list of restaurants in that country; it would be only a few pages to flip through. Much better for the user; much better for the database.
Addenda
In order to optimize the pagination, get the paginated list of pages from a single table (so that you can 'remember where you left off'). Then join the language table(s) to look up the translations. Note that this only looks up on page's worth of translations, not thousands.