Did you try a straight join so MySQL won't swap the order of the tables?
Philip Smolen wrote:
>Right. The simple example listed at the bottom of this message works great
>under version 4. Version 3 gave the right answer, but it was very slow.
>That made me upgrade to version 4.
>
>However, even with version 4, I run into the same problem as soon as I add a
>join. MySQL always wants to find an index to match the join conditions. If
>there isn't an appropriate index, it actually sorts the data to match join
>conditions! This is probably right in the general case, but it makes my
>query run very slowly. How can I make this run faster?
>
>SELECT *
>FROM huge_table,small_table
>WHERE huge_table.field2 = small_table.field2
>ORDER BY huge_table.field1 DESC
>LIMIT 5;
>
>I want MySQL to use the index on huge_table.field1, just like it does when
>there is no join.
>
