MySQL Reference Manual :: 7.2.10 How MySQL Optimizes ORDER BY

In some cases, MySQL can use an index to satisfy an ORDER BY clause without doing any extra sorting.

The index can also be used even if the ORDER BY doesn't match the index exactly, as long as all the unused index parts and all the extra are ORDER BY columns are constants in the WHERE clause. The following queries use the index to resolve the ORDER BY part:

SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY key_part1,key_part2,... ;
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE key_part1=constant ORDER BY key_part2;
SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY key_part1 DESC, key_part2 DESC;
SELECT * FROM t1
    WHERE key_part1=1 ORDER BY key_part1 DESC, key_part2 DESC;

In some cases, MySQL cannot use indexes to resolve the ORDER BY, although it still uses indexes to find the rows that match the WHERE clause. These cases include the following:

With EXPLAIN SELECT ... ORDER BY, you can check whether MySQL can use indexes to resolve the query. It cannot if you see Using filesort in the Extra column. See Section 7.2.1, “EXPLAIN Syntax (Get Information About a SELECT)”.

In those cases where MySQL must sort the result, it uses the following filesort algorithm before MySQL 4.1:

One problem with this approach is that it reads rows twice: One time when evaluating the WHERE clause, and again after sorting the pair values. And even if the rows were accessed successively the first time (for example, if a table scan is done), the second time they are accessed randomly. (The sort keys are ordered, but the row positions are not.)

In MySQL 4.1 and up, a filesort optimization is used that records not only the sort key value and row position, but also the columns required for the query. This avoids reading the rows twice. The modified filesort algorithm works like this:

Using the modified filesort algorithm, the tuples are longer than the pairs used in the original method, and fewer of them fit in the sort buffer (the size of which is given by sort_buffer_size). As a result, it is possible for the extra I/O to make the modified approach slower, not faster. To avoid a slowdown, the optimization is used only if the total size of the extra columns in the sort tuple does not exceed the value of the max_length_for_sort_data system variable. (A symptom of setting the value of this variable too high is that you should see high disk activity and low CPU activity.)

If you want to increase ORDER BY speed, first see whether you can get MySQL to use indexes rather than an extra sorting phase. If this is not possible, you can try the following strategies:

By default, MySQL sorts all GROUP BY col1, col2, ... queries as if you specified ORDER BY col1, col2, ... in the query as well. If you include an ORDER BY clause explicitly that contains the same column list, MySQL optimizes it away without any speed penalty, although the sorting still occurs. If a query includes GROUP BY but you want to avoid the overhead of sorting the result, you can suppress sorting by specifying ORDER BY NULL. For example:

INSERT INTO foo
SELECT a, COUNT(*) FROM bar GROUP BY a ORDER BY NULL;