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Archive for June 18th, 2009

Counting bans

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From Stack Overflow:

I have a MyISAM table in MySQL 5.0 like this:

id login ip banned

I would like to find all users not banned (banned = 0) if at least 5 other users with the same ip have already been banned (banned = 1).

To do this, we should first find which IP's have more than 5 bans and then find all non-banned users for these IP's.

To find the IP's we can use two methods:

  1. Find all banned IP's, group them and filter out those that have COUNT(*) < 5
  2. For each IP possible, find if there are 5 banned records for this IP using a LIMIT clause

The first method doesn't require doing an extra JOIN on the table, but it will do count all values just to figure out if the COUNT(*) is more or less than 5.

The second method stops counting whenever it find the 5th value, but it requires an extra JOIN.

Counting is bad if there are many values to count, and the extra join is bad if there are many JOIN loops.

This means that the first method should be faster if there are lots of banned records, the, and the second method is faster for few banned records and few distinct IP's.

Let's create two sample tables and see:
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Written by Quassnoi

June 18th, 2009 at 11:00 pm

Posted in MySQL