I have two tables in MySQL that are related. I would like to find the rows in table A that do not have a corresponding row table B. The manual and other threads here on SO recommend doing this:
SELECT a.id
FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON a.id = b.a_id
WHERE b.id IS NULL;
However, this is very slow. In my case, table A has less than 5000 rows, and table B is at around 40000, but this query is taking up to 8 minutes.
Does anybody know how to achieve this faster?
Thank you very much,
matt
EDIT: The index was the problem. After creating one, the query runs in 10 microseconds.
解决方案
Cover a_id field with index in b table
Replace WHERE b.id IS NULL with WHERE b.a_id IS NULL