Speed up SQL SELECT with arithmetic and geometric calculations - mysql

Question

This is a follow-up to my previous post How to improve wind data SQL query performance.
I have expanded the SQL statement to also perform the first part in the calculation of the average wind direction using circular statistics. This means that I want to calculate the average of the cosines and sines of the wind direction. In my PHP script, I will then perform the second part and calculate the inverse tangent and add 180 or 360 degrees if necessary.
The wind direction is stored in my table as voltages read from the sensor in the field 'dirvolt' so I first need to convert it to radians.
The user can look at historical wind data by stepping backwards using a pagination function, hence the use of LIMIT which values are set dynamically in my PHP script.
My SQL statement currently looks like this:
SELECT ROUND(AVG(speed),1) AS speed_mean, MAX(speed) as speed_max,
MIN(speed) AS speed_min, MAX(dt) AS last_dt,
AVG(SIN(2.04*dirvolt-0.12)) as dir_sin_mean,
AVG(COS(2.04*dirvolt-0.12)) as dir_cos_mean
FROM table
GROUP BY FLOOR(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dt) / 300)
ORDER BY FLOOR(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dt) / 300) DESC
LIMIT 0, 72
The query takes about 3-8 seconds to run depending on what value I use to group the data (300 in the code above).
In order for me to learn, is there anything I can do to optimize or improve the SQL statement otherwise?

Answer 1

SHOW CREATE TABLE table;
From that I can see if you already have INDEX(dt) (or equivalent). With that, we can modify the SELECT to be significantly faster.
But first, change the focus from 72*300 seconds worth of readings to datetime ranges, which is 6(?) hours.
Let's look at this query:
SELECT * FROM table
WHERE dt >= '...' - INTERVAL 6 HOUR
AND dt < '...';
The '...' would be the same datetime in both places. Does that run fast enough with the index?
If yes, then let's build the final query using that as a subquery:
SELECT FORMAT(AVG(speed), 1) AS speed_mean,
MAX(speed) as speed_max,
MIN(speed) AS speed_min,
MAX(dt) AS last_dt,
AVG(SIN(2.04*dirvolt-0.12)) as dir_sin_mean,
AVG(COS(2.04*dirvolt-0.12)) as dir_cos_mean
FROM
( SELECT * FROM table
WHERE dt >= '...' - INTERVAL 6 HOUR
AND dt < '...'
) AS x
GROUP BY FLOOR(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dt) / 300)
ORDER BY FLOOR(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dt) / 300) DESC;
Explanation: What you had could not use an index, hence had to scan the entire table (which is getting bigger and bigger). My subquery could use an index, hence was much faster. The effort for my outer query was not "too bad" since it worked with only N rows.