The MySQL explain plan is a great tool to help developers and
database administrators to improve the performance of specific
queries happening against a database. It is very easy to use, but
its output can be confusing, so I thought I'd show a very simple
example.
Let's begin by looking at a table called recipes
mysql> desc recipes;
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id | int(11) | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| name | varchar(400) | NO | MUL | NULL | |
| description | text | YES | | NULL | |
| category_id | int(11) | YES | MUL | NULL | |
| chef_id | int(255) | NO | MUL | NULL | |
| created | datetime | YES | | …
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