10 Common MySQL Index Failure Scenarios – Which Ones Affect You?
This article examines ten typical situations where MySQL indexes become ineffective, explains the underlying reasons such as function usage, implicit type conversion, wildcard LIKE patterns, OR conditions, left‑most prefix violations, small tables, stale statistics, NULL handling, GROUP BY/DISTINCT, and ORDER BY, and provides concrete SQL examples and step‑by‑step remediation techniques to restore optimal query performance.
