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Database Indexes : Database Index

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Database Indexes
Akhila Mupparaju
Wilmington University
IST-7000
April 23, 2015
Sten David.

Database Indexes A Database, support query optimization technique (Jeffery A. Hoffer, V. Ramesh, Heikki Topi, 2010). An index is a pointer to the data in a table, and it is an access mechanism that helps to find out where a record present. A database can have one or more indexes connected with it. A database index is one type of data structure, it is used to improve the performance of the database, and it can help quick retrieval operations in the database. An index can be created using one column or multiple columns in a database table. Additionally, index is used to create table filed …show more content…

1. Factors for quality of an index and When & why to use indexes:
Factors for quality of an index: There are many factors for quality of an index like access type, access time, insertion time, deletion time, and space overhead.
Access type: By using the access type factor, we can easily access the required record or data from database table. In few situations, we didn’t get the exact searching data from database table, in that cases access type is used show a record that near to the record we want.
Access time: Access time is nothing but how much time does it take to find a selected record with the help of an index.
Insertion time: Whenever a new record is entered into the file, then how much time does it take to insert the details about the file or record in the index, and how much extra time does entry in the index cost.
Deletion time: Whenever delete a record from a file, would have to delete the corresponding entry from the index as well. So the time taken for this process is called deletion time.
Space overhead: Space overhead is defined as how much space does the index itself take in the memory.
These are few factors for quality of an index in the database.
When and why to use indexes: Indexes are used to create sequential or non-sequential order of data. In a physical database design, we must use attributes to create indexes. The database

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