TokuDB sorting time different between ASC vs DESC

Question

This is MariaDB + TokuDB 7.1 community downloaded from Tokutek. Please accept my ignorance if this is normal behavior but I have a question about sorting results. I'm experiencing huge time difference in sorting between the two sort directions - ascending and descending:

SELECT sql_no_cache id, createts, deleted
FROM sort_test
WHERE createts > '2000098'
ORDER BY createts asc

+---------+----------+---------+
| id      | createts | deleted |
+---------+----------+---------+
| 1999999 |  2000099 |    NULL |
| 2000000 |  2000100 |    NULL |
+---------+----------+---------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT sql_no_cache id, createts, deleted
FROM sort_test
WHERE createts > '2000098'
ORDER BY createts desc

+---------+----------+---------+
| id      | createts | deleted |
+---------+----------+---------+
| 2000000 |  2000100 |    NULL |
| 1999999 |  2000099 |    NULL |
+---------+----------+---------+
2 rows in set (0.55 sec)

Below I present my simplified test case. Here is the table:

CREATE TABLE `sort_test` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `createts` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `deleted` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `idx_createts` (`createts`)
) ENGINE=TokuDB

Here I populate the table with 2 million rows using this procedure:

delimiter ;;

drop procedure if exists sort_test_populate;;

create procedure sort_test_populate()
begin
DECLARE int_val INT DEFAULT 1;
myloop : LOOP
  if (int_val > 2000000) THEN
    LEAVE myloop;
  end if;
  insert into sort_test (id, createts) values (int_val, int_val+100);
  set int_val = int_val +1;
end loop;
end;;

call sort_test_populate();;
Query OK, 1 row affected (28 min 2.80 sec)

Here are my test queries again:

SELECT sql_no_cache id, createts, deleted
FROM sort_test
WHERE createts > '2000098'
ORDER BY createts asc

2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT sql_no_cache id, createts, deleted
FROM sort_test
WHERE createts > '2000098'
ORDER BY createts desc

2 rows in set (0.55 sec)

And here is the "explain extended" result, it's identical for both queries:

+------+-------------+-----------+-------+---------------+--------------+---------+------+------+----------+-------------+
| id   | select_type | table     | type  | possible_keys | key          | key_len | ref  | rows | filtered | Extra       |
+------+-------------+-----------+-------+---------------+--------------+---------+------+------+----------+-------------+
|    1 | SIMPLE      | sort_test | range | idx_createts  | idx_createts | 5       | NULL |    2 |   100.00 | Using where |
+------+-------------+-----------+-------+---------------+--------------+---------+------+------+----------+-------------+

Please note that this is not my exact data I'm working with, that would be too much to include here. I just wanted to create some test data to demonstrate the problem. My question is - why it's behaving like this and how to make the descending order query faster?

Answer 1

This is a known bug with Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). The workaround is to disable ICP by setting the optimizer_switch either globally or within the session executing this query.

mysql> SET optimizer_switch='index_condition_pushdown=off';

(full disclosure, I'm an employee at Tokutek, makers of TokuDB)