EXPLAIN EXTENDED

Answering questions asked on the site.

Victor asks:

I have a table which I will call sale to protect the innocent:

Sale

id	product	price	amount	date

I need to retrieve ultimate values of price, amount and date for each product:

SELECT  product,
MIN(price), MAX(price),
MIN(amount), MAX(amount),
MIN(date), MAX(date)
FROM    sale
GROUP BY
product

The query only returns about 100 records.

I have all these fields indexed (together with product), but this still produces a full table scan over 3,000,000 records.

How do I speed up this query?

To retrieve the ultimate values of the fields, MySQL would just need to make a loose index scan over each index and take the max and min value of the field for each product.

However, the optimizer won't do when multiple indexes are involved. Instead, it will revert to a full scan.

There is a workaround for it. Let's create a sample table and see them:

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