MySQL Integer comparison speed (= vs <>)

Question

I have a table with a field "active". Active is an indexed tinyint(4), but only contains a value of 1 or 0. I know... not great design, but I inherited this system to maintain.

If it helps, this table has 175277 records.

When I run:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE active = 1;

it takes 0.497 seconds.

but when I run

SELECT * FROM table WHERE active <> 0; 

(active has to equal 1 cause thats the only possible other value.)

It only takes 0.095 seconds.

I was doing some query optimization and noticed this and was wondering why?

Answer 1

Solved!

As suggested above, I used EXPLAIN to see what the query is doing and it turned out the engine decided to use a different key for each query.