slow searching views on Mysql....

[Scooby]

Hi all.

I'm having some problems with slow searching of a view that unions two tables in mysql...

table one, is large with lookup contents for some 1.2m records
table two, same stucture but with local custom records - circa couple of hundred.

each get updated fairly regularly, they are unioned together to form one view to search from.

The user searches a view to return a record, but it is painfully slow. searching either table directly returns result relatively quickly, but searching the view can be minutes.

whats the best way to overcome this...? can I index views? I can't seem to find anything  relatively recent?

if not, is there some nifty php to use one query to search both tables one after the other.... will have a  unique identifier across both tables.

Thanks in advance.

Scoob

[JasonD]

Two simple fast queries is generally faster than one complex slow query.

Would need to know more on how the tables are structured and what the view and/or other parts of the query say to suggest anything specific. An EXPLAIN query may help, or not.

[Scooby]

Cheers, I've gone for an if / else check for now, and I'll see how it goes.