Fixing MySQL's InnoDB poor COUNT() performance in 3 easy steps.

During my internship at sound of data I had to build a management interface that enabled the user to view the push messages our platform (IRIS) sent to our clients. The amount of messages we are sending on a daily base are immense, so I had to come up with a good way to display this data pretty much on the fly. I ran into a lot of issues (all of which I've fixed), but the main problem was MySQL's InnoDB very poor COUNT() performance when iterating through ~2 million lines of test data I've inserted into the database. I found a nice work-around for this problem that speeded up querying the amount of rows in the database by a factor ~million. More...