[Ameo]

(copying my reply from the other comment that said the same thing as you)

The order of conditions in a WHERE definitely does matter, especially in cases where the conditions are on non-indexed columns or there are CPU-intensive search operations like regex, string ops, etc.

I just ran this test locally with a table I created that has 50 million rows:

``` » time sqlite3 test.db "select count() from test WHERE a != 'a' AND a != 'b' AND a != 'c' AND a != 'd' AND b != 'c' AND d != 'd' AND e != 'f' AND f = 'g'" sqlite3 test.db 5.50s user 0.72s system 99% cpu 6.225 total » time sqlite3 test.db "select count() from test WHERE f = 'g' AND a != 'a' AND a != 'b' AND a != 'c' AND a != 'd' AND b != 'c' AND d != 'd' AND e != 'f'" sqlite3 test.db 1.51s user 0.72s system 99% cpu 2.231 total ```

The only difference is swapping the `f = 'g'` condition from last to first. That condition never matches in this query, so it's able to fail fast and skip all of the work of checking the other conditions.

[crazygringo]

Sorry, I should have clarified -- the order of WHERE conditions doesn't matter for whether an index is utilized. I thought that was the context of the original comment, but now I realize maybe it was unclear.

Yes, of course you can skip evaluating other conditions if an AND fails and that can affect speed. So that's the same as most programming languages.