What's a reasonable number of rows and tables to be able to join in MySQL?
- by Philip Brocoum
I have one table that maps locations to postal codes. For example, New York State has about 2000 postal codes. I have another table that maps mail to the postal codes it was sent to, but this table has about 5 million rows. I want to find all the mail that was sent to New York State, which seems simple enough, but the query is unbelievably slow. I haven't been able to even wait long enough for it to finish. Is the problem that there are 5 million rows? I can't help but think that 5 million shouldn't be such a large number for a computer these days... Oh, and everything is indexed. Is SQL just not designed to handle such large joins?