What is faster in MySQL <> 0 (not equal) or > 0 (greater than)

Posted On: January 30, 2024

In general, if you are looking for a straightforward answer without considering the context, > 0 is likely to be marginally faster than <> 0. The reason is that > is a simpler operation compared to <> (not equal), and in many database systems, simple comparison operations are optimized more efficiently.

However, it's crucial to emphasize that the actual performance difference between these two conditions is likely to be extremely small and might not be noticeable in most cases. The database query optimizer and execution engine are designed to handle such basic conditions efficiently.

If you have specific concerns about the performance of these conditions in your database, we recommend benchmarking both with your actual data and workload to determine if there is any meaningful difference in execution times.

Test case.

We executed the same API 1000 times, varying the SQL WHERE statement, and here are the results:

> 0 (greater than): AJAX call took 288889.59999990463 milliseconds

<> 0 (not equal): AJAX call took 293539.39999985695 milliseconds

Queries Ran:

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM table WHERE other_id <> 0 Execution time: 0.701s

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM table WHERE other_id > 0  Execution time 0.693s

Associated tags:  MySQL