I have a table which is 87,000 recs long. I'm trying to pull out the latest 160 recs by date. If I do the select such as ...$stmt="select data.identifier,hint,platform,priority,date,description,h
ost from data,words where words.word like \"$desc\" AND data.identifier=words.identifier DESC LIMIT 0,160";
The query returns in 0.12 secs on average. However as soon as I use "ORDER BY date" ( which is an indexed field ) the query takes 14 secs to return. Now I know that the "order by" introduces the concept of having to look through the whole table as compared to just retrieving the first 160 records hit, but does anyone know of a way of speeding up the order by, or maybe some lateral thinking way of aranging the data into the table in the first place so that I know that the data is in desening date order before I start hence making the need to order by redundant !!
Your help is appreciated. Sorry for the long post :-)
