7. Indexing Strategies

Like beauty, the most attractive indexing strategy is very much in the eye of the beholder. After indexes are in place for primary, join, and filter keys (a universal standard of indexing beauty, perhaps?), what works for application A might be the wrong approach for application B.

Application A might be a transactional system that supports tens of thousands of quick interactions with the database, and its data modifications must be made in milliseconds. Application B might be a decision support system in which users create an ample assortment of server-hogging queries. These two applications require very different indexing tactics.

In addition, MySQL’s optimizer always tries to use the information at hand ...

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