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Index Tuning

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

Index Tuning is concerned with when and how to construct an index.

Historical Background

When relational models were first introduced, customers complained that vendors had introduced them to slowed down customer applications in order to make the customers buy more hardware. Vendors and researchers responded to the performance challenge by incorporating existing data structures (notably B-trees and hash structures) and improving many new ones (notably bit vectors and multi-dimensional indexes). The decision of which data structures to create was left to the user. This entry concerns that decision.

Foundations

An index is a data structure plus a method of arranging the data tuples in the table (or other kind of collection object) being indexed. The syntax for constructing indexes is discussed elsewhere. This entry presents the tuning considerations.

Two data structures are most often used in practice for indexes: B+-trees and Hash structures. Of these, B+-trees are used the...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Celko J. Joe Celko’s SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (3rd edn.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Fransisco, CA, 2005.

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  2. Kimball R. and Ross M. The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (2nd edn.). Wiley, New York, NY, 2002.

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  3. Shasha D. and Bonnet P. Database Tuning: Principles, Experiments and Troubleshooting Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann, San Fransisco, CA, 2002.

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  4. Tow D. SQL Tuning. OReilly, Sebastopol, CA, 2003.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Philippe Bonnet

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Dennis Shasha

Authors
  1. Philippe Bonnet
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  2. Dennis Shasha
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Bonnet, P., Shasha, D. (2009). Index Tuning. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_197

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