Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Post History

75%
+4 −0
Q&A Is there a way to estimate the execution time of a statement in MySQL?

The best way to estimate this is to measure it, for instance by importing a backup of the production database into a new instance and run your scripts there. Short of that, you could consult the ex...

posted 3y ago by meriton‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar meriton‭ · 2020-09-25T15:30:59Z (over 3 years ago)
The best way to estimate this is to measure it, for instance by importing a backup of the production database into a new instance and run your scripts there.

Short of that, you could consult the execution plan of your query to get a rough idea about the amount of work the database will be doing, and the estimated cardinalities involved. Problem is that depending on the complexity of your query, these estimates may be significantly off base. For instance, while table size estimates are generally very accurate, estimates about how many rows match a certain condition can be way off. 

Simple `alter table` statements are generally I/O bound, so the execution time will be proportional to table size on disk.

Note that regardless of the method your choose, you should not rely on the estimate to be very precise. I recall an extreme case where a script took 2 hours in test, but 10 hours in production (!). It later turned out the database was on virtualized hardware together with other database servers, all of which were running their nightly backup at the same time, temporarily overloading the hardware ...