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How to create fast database queries

Rating movies

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From Stack Overflow:

I have the following query in SQL Server:

SELECT  TOP 50 CustomerID FROM Ratings
WHERE   CustomerID != 915
        AND MovieID IN
        (
        SELECT DISTINCT MovieID
        FROM Ratings
        WHERE CustomerID = 915
        )
GROUP BY
        CustomerID
ORDER BY
        COUNT(*) DESC

It is super fast, but when I try to use it in a subquery like this:

SELECT  *
FROM    Ratings
WHERE   MovieID = 1
        AND CustomerID IN
        (
        SELECT  TOP 50 CustomerID FROM Ratings
        WHERE   CustomerID != 915
                AND MovieID IN
                (
                SELECT DISTINCT MovieID
                FROM Ratings
                WHERE CustomerID = 915
                )
        )
GROUP BY
        CustomerID
ORDER BY
        COUNT(*) DESC

, it's getting slow.

Any ideas on why this is so slow and how I can speed it up?

My PRIMARY KEY is (MovieID, CustomerID) and I added a index on CustomerID

This query is in fact a simple but efficient movie rating assistant.

When a user searches for a movie, it shows him ratings other users gave to this movie, but only from those people who mostly watches and rates the same movies as the user in question.

This is quite a fair rating system, as if a user is into Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! and Surf Nazis Must Die, his taste correlates with taste of people who watches and rates the same stuff better than with one of those who watches Titanic

Now, returning to the query. To build an advice on movie 1 for user 915, we need to do the following:

  1. Build a list of movies that the user 915 rated
  2. Build the list of users who have watched movie 1 and have rated the same movies as user 915 had
  3. Select TOP 50 users who had rated most movies of those user 915 had also rated
  4. Show their opinions on movie 1

If we look into this plan, we will see two search conditions. On step 1, we need to select movie's for a given user, while on step 2 we need to select user's for a given movie.

Since we don't need any other fields on steps 1 and 2, this query will benefit from creating two composite indexes of the same set of columns: MovieID and CustomerID, in different order.

Since we already have a PRIMARY KEY on (MovieID, CustomerID), we'll need to add just one more index on (CustomerID, MovieID).

And since these pairs are unique, we will also make this index UNIQUE. (My article Making an index UNIQUE describes why you should always declare UNIQUE index on intrinsically unique data.)

Having two UNIQUE indexes on the same set of columns may seem a redundancy. And in fact, it is.

But let's remember that any index is a redundancy. An index does not keep any data not initially contained in the table, it just arranges it so that it can be accessed faster.

So if two indexes will make our query even more fast, then hail redundancy!

Let's create the sample table:

Table creation details

Written by Quassnoi

April 30th, 2009 at 11:00 pm

Posted in SQL Server

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