Fast data retrieval in MySQL

Question

I have a table of users - It contains around millions of rows (user-id is the primary key).

I just want to retrieve user-id and their joining date.

Using SELECT user-id, joining-date FROM users requires lot of time. Is there a fast way to query/retrieve the same data from this table?

Answer 1

To get the highest speed in such a query, you'd need to use a column-oriented database (like LucidDB) or a key-value system (like Cassandra). Using e.g. LucidDB should give you a 1-2 orders of magnitude performance boost with that kind of query. You don't have to replace MySQL: you can just support this use case arround