Most efficient query to get last modified record in large table

Question

I have a table with a large number of records ( > 300,000). The most relevant fields in the table are:

• CREATE_DATE
• MOD_DATE

Those are updat

Answer 1

Use EXPLAIN:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/explain.html

This tells You how mysql executes statement, thanks to that You can figure out most efficient way, cause it depends on Your db structure and there is no one universal solution.