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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

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Q&A Why would excluding records by creating a temporary table of their primary keys be faster than simply excluding by value?

Why would the second way be faster? Generally speaking, the first form will perform worse (as well as looking a lot worse) than the second. You are hitting an edge case where the opposite is true...

posted 4y ago by Jack Douglas‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Jack Douglas‭ · 2020-08-09T17:52:27Z (over 4 years ago)
> Why would the second way be faster?

Generally speaking, the first form will perform worse (as well as looking a lot worse) than the second. You are hitting an edge case where the opposite is true, because:

1. The `not in` in your first example is likely to be transformed into an anti-join (something like [this](https://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=mysql_8.0&fiddle=4436e351646efbb4a99708f09ef9904f)). Because you also have "…just a handful of records where a bit(1) column is set to 1…" that anti-join is likely to be fairly fast.

2. Bad stats or bad luck means that the optimizer is making a wrong choice when filtering. Perhaps it is choosing a full table scan in the second case, or failing to use a good index.

We'd need to know your actual plans/indexes/etc to be able to say more, as several people have mentioned in comments.