While we always want better performance and more and larger features for MySQL, those cannot just “magically appear” from one version to another, requiring deep architecture changes and lots of lines of code. However, there are sometimes smaller features and fixes that could be implemented by an intern or an external contributor, mainly at SQL layer, and that could make the MySQL ecosystem friendlier to newbies and non-experts. Making a piece of software easier to use is sometimes overlooked, but it is incredibly important -not everybody using MySQL is a DBA, and the more people adopting it, more people will be able to live from it, both upstream and as third party providers.

Here it is my own personal list of fixes for EXPLAIN messages. If you are an experienced MySQL user you are probably aware of their meaning, but that doesn’t solve the problem for beginners. The reason why I am writing a blog post is to gather …

I’m currently working on a new project about the explain command output.
For my research I’ve read a lot of documentations, presentations and blog posts and I would like to focus on the join type in the explain output.
And in particular when type=index in this explain output.

Take a look at what says the official documentation about type=index :

Wait a second, only the index tree is scanned? really?
This description seems to be the definition of a covering index.
But a covering index is only characterized by a “Using index” in the extra column of the explain output.

Consider the t1 table, just …