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How indexes power your database
- Indexes are used in databases to retrieve information as fast as possible by providing an additional data structure that provides references to data in disk
- The typical implementation of indexes use variations of the B-Tree data structure to store references to the pages
- The binary search has logarithmic time complexity and is generally faster than linear complexity
- Creating an index for a table means creating a separate table that includes mapped column data
- The database would scan this index table rather than every row of the original table when a user tries to search for a specific column's value
- In this article, we explored how indexes can power our databases and speed-up reading operations
- We saw that indexes uses binary search instead of sequential access in full table scan, which increases its efficiency
- Through the practical example, we understood how the database plans the query execution on tables with and without indexes
- It is important to understand how to optimize our queries to retrieve information as fast as possible
- This is crucial for databases with large datasets to avoid the traversal millions of rows when searching for a single user, etc
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