How can you tell what uses up more resources?

[jtown]

There are multiple ways of doing the same thing with MySQL and I was wondering if there's a way I can determine which statements execute faster. For instance you can do something like this.

SELECT id FROM table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1

or

SELECT MAX(id) FROM table

How can you tell which way is faster? It may be negligible, but when you have to do a lot of em, it can make a difference.

[eoghain]

Yes there is something called Explain. Check the manual for the proper syntax for MySQL but this will output what the database is doing to complete your request.