Use the Index, Luke(use-the-index-luke.com)
use-the-index-luke.com
Use the Index, Luke
https://use-the-index-luke.com/
4 comments
Over time I’ve found this site good for getting the basics across.
As an SRE with a database background this should be required reading for any development team.
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At the same time, it feels a bit like it's become such a standardised fallback approach that people will sometimes throw indexes at a problem instead of applying some thought to the query.
Admittedly, I'm basing this on a few personal anecdotes. For example, a long time ago an acquaintance posted a question on Facebook about speeding up a query in a database of astronomy data, where they were filtering based on a triangle-inequality style formula a^2 + b^2 < c^2. The first five comments said they would just index the a, b and c columns, which would probably work but the author didn't have the right permissions on the DB and only needed to run the query once anyway. I didn't know much SQL at the time but suggested trying a quick initial filtering of the form a + b > c on the data before calculating the formula with squares. This apparently sped it up sufficiently for their purpose.