Hi, I'm working on a pair comparison site where a user loads a list of films and grades from another site. My site then picks two random movies and matches them against each other, the user selects the better of the two and a new pair is loaded. This gives a complete list of movies ordered by whichever is best.
The database contains three tables;
fm_film_data - this contains all imported movies
fm_film_data(id int(11),
imdb_id varchar(10),
tmdb_id varchar(10),
title varchar(255),
original_title varchar(255),
year year(4),
director text,
description text,
poster_url varchar(255))
fm_films - this contains all information related to a user, what movies the user has seen, what grades the user has given, as well as information about each film's wins/losses for that user.
fm_films(id int(11),
user_id int(11),
film_id int(11),
grade int(11),
wins int(11),
losses int(11))
fm_log - this contains records of every duel that has occurred.
fm_log(id int(11),
user_id int(11),
winner int(11),
loser int(11))
To pick a pair to show the user, I've created a mySQL query that checks the log and picks a pair at random.
SELECT pair.id1, pair.id2
FROM
(SELECT part1.id AS id1, part2.id AS id2
FROM fm_films AS part1, fm_films AS part2
WHERE part1.id <> part2.id
AND part1.user_id = [!!USERID!!]
AND part2.user_id = [!!USERID!!])
AS pair
LEFT JOIN
(SELECT winner AS id1, loser AS id2
FROM fm_log
WHERE fm_log.user_id = [!!USERID!!]
UNION
SELECT loser AS id1, winner AS id2
FROM fm_log
WHERE fm_log.user_id = [!!USERID!!])
AS log
ON pair.id1 = log.id1 AND pair.id2 = log.id2
WHERE log.id1 IS NULL
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 1
This query takes some time to load, about 6 seconds in our tests with two users with about 800 grades each.
I'm looking for a way to optimize this but still limit all duels to appear only once.
The server runs MySQL version 5.0.90-community.
