Firstly, you might want to read the manual on EXPLAIN
. It's a dense read, but it should provide most of the information you want.
Secondly, as Strawberry says, the second query works by accident. The behaviour may change in future versions, and your query would not return an error, just different data. That's nearly always a bad thing.
Finally, the EXPLAIN
suggests that version 1 will be faster. In EXTRA, it's saying it's using an index, which is much faster than filesort. Without a schema, it's hard to be sure, but I think you will also benefit from a compound key on ID and visitdate.