next »

[perkiset]

I'd bet the speed difference would actually come into play more with a subquery than between MAX and order by. Since the row result is so small (always will be) and MySQL creates you a temp table anyway, I think it's probably a wash.

In the subquery method, there are two walks across the table, where with the order by/DESC/limit 1 method is only 1 walk, but it creates a temporary table that is probably the full size of the original result set and then only returns the first row.

Dog - do you have any thoughts on this re. speed, particularly if this question was raised against a much larger dataset?