UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Recently added posts

Scream -

I have written a script that gets the last 10 written posts from the w3t_posts table.

We would like to display these recently added posts on our main index page, the problem being is that there are 20,000 messages in our database already (we are developing a large system).

My question is this : Is the db smart enough to index these recently added posts efficiently so that they are easily retreived, or is everytime this script runs, the db will traverse through the entire table with some 20,000 entries, looking for the most recent 10 added?

I don't know enough about database design to answer this myself, so please enlighten me. Please describe what the difference between a 'key' and 'index' is, if this is relavent to my question.

We are currenty running PHP version 5.1.6.

Thanks in advance.


= Jim =

It really depends on how your query is being run. A good thing to do is drop to a mysql prompt and put DESCRIBE before your query. This will tell you if the query is using an index or not (indexes and keys are basically the same). If it isn't using an index then it will scan the entire table each time.

This may be something you can run in a cron job and spit out a static file as well.