"how to avoid “using temporary” in many-to-many queries?" Code Answer

Here's a simplified example I did for a similar performance related question sometime ago that takes advantage of innodb clustered primary key indexes (obviously only available with innodb !!)

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-index-types.html
• http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/07/04/how-to-exploit-mysql-index-optimizations/

You have 3 tables: category, product and product_category as follows:

drop table if exists product;
create table product
(
prod_id int unsigned not null auto_increment primary key,
name varchar(255) not null unique
)
engine = innodb; 

drop table if exists category;
create table category
(
cat_id mediumint unsigned not null auto_increment primary key,
name varchar(255) not null unique
)
engine = innodb; 

drop table if exists product_category;
create table product_category
(
cat_id mediumint unsigned not null,
prod_id int unsigned not null,
primary key (cat_id, prod_id) -- **note the clustered composite index** !!
)
engine = innodb;

The most import thing is the order of the product_catgeory clustered composite primary key as typical queries for this scenario always lead by cat_id = x or cat_id in (x,y,z...).

We have 500K categories, 1 million products and 125 million product categories.

select count(*) from category;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|   500000 |
+----------+

select count(*) from product;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|  1000000 |
+----------+

select count(*) from product_category;
+-----------+
| count(*)  |
+-----------+
| 125611877 |
+-----------+

So let's see how this schema performs for a query similar to yours. All queries are run cold (after mysql restart) with empty buffers and no query caching.

select
 p.*
from
 product p
inner join product_category pc on 
    pc.cat_id = 4104 and pc.prod_id = p.prod_id
order by
 p.prod_id desc -- sry dont a date field in this sample table - wont make any difference though
limit 20;

+---------+----------------+
| prod_id | name           |
+---------+----------------+
|  993561 | Product 993561 |
|  991215 | Product 991215 |
|  989222 | Product 989222 |
|  986589 | Product 986589 |
|  983593 | Product 983593 |
|  982507 | Product 982507 |
|  981505 | Product 981505 |
|  981320 | Product 981320 |
|  978576 | Product 978576 |
|  973428 | Product 973428 |
|  959384 | Product 959384 |
|  954829 | Product 954829 |
|  953369 | Product 953369 |
|  951891 | Product 951891 |
|  949413 | Product 949413 |
|  947855 | Product 947855 |
|  947080 | Product 947080 |
|  945115 | Product 945115 |
|  943833 | Product 943833 |
|  942309 | Product 942309 |
+---------+----------------+
20 rows in set (0.70 sec) 

explain
select
 p.*
from
 product p
inner join product_category pc on 
    pc.cat_id = 4104 and pc.prod_id = p.prod_id
order by
 p.prod_id desc -- sry dont a date field in this sample table - wont make any diference though
limit 20;

+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+---------+---------+------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type   | possible_keys | key     | key_len | ref           | rows | Extra                                        |
+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+---------+---------+------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | pc    | ref    | PRIMARY       | PRIMARY | 3       | const           |  499 | Using index; Using temporary; Using filesort |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | p     | eq_ref | PRIMARY       | PRIMARY | 4       | vl_db.pc.prod_id |    1 |                                              |
+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+---------+---------+------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

So that's 0.70 seconds cold - ouch.

Hope this helps :)

EDIT

Having just read your reply to my comment above it seems you have one of two choices to make:

create table articles_to_categories
(
article_id int unsigned not null,
category_id mediumint unsigned not null,
primary key(article_id, category_id), -- good for queries that lead with article_id = x
key (category_id)
)
engine=innodb;

or.

create table categories_to_articles
(
article_id int unsigned not null,
category_id mediumint unsigned not null,
primary key(category_id, article_id), -- good for queries that lead with category_id = x
key (article_id)
)
engine=innodb;

depends on your typical queries as to how you define your clustered PK.