Re: SEVEN cross joins?!?!?

Frank Bax wrote:
>> Are you saying that you WANT to generate a cross-join, score the
>> millions of results and then pick the best 10? It's doing what you
>> want, but you'd like it to be faster.
>>
>> Or are you saying that you'd like to avoid the explosion in rows
>> altogether?
>>
>> In either case - I don't suppose you could provide a real example of
>> the query, so we can see exactly what you're trying to do.
>
>
> There is no "best 10". I currently limit each subselect to 10 items so
> that query will actually run without crashing. I would like to remove
> the "ORDER BY itemid LIMIT 10" mentioned above. At the end of the query
> I have a "LIMIT 100" clause which will stay and produces a list of "best
> 100" combos.
>
> Either of your solutions would be acceptable; since avoiding the
> "explosion" would also make the query faster. Current calculations
> indicate that running the query without "LIMIT 10" in subselect would
> take years to process.

OK - so at the heart of the problem is the fact that you want to search
a space with 100 billion possible states. There are three main options

1. Brute force and patience - simple and is guaranteed to produce the
"best" answers. You can use cursors/multiple queries to manage the
workload. The disadvantage is that it's probably slower than you'd like.
2. Smarter algorithms - possibly something genetic to work towards local
maxima. Or, if you'd like to keep it simple, just split your 7 locations
into 2,2,3 and solve for each separately.
3. Statistical - examine a subset of possible states and accept you'll
only be able to say "almost best" to 99% confidence or similar.

I'd be tempted by #2 - there are probably some combinations you can rule
out, which combined with a split/recombine should reduce the number of
states to query.

That any help?
--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd