
4.5 Summary 69
4.5 Summary
This chapter discusses the relationships between the different types of queries, indexing
methods, and access methods. Knowledge of these relationships and what makes an
index effective is very helpful in the decision-making process for index selection. There
are seven critical index design decisions:
1. Whether or not an index is required, and if so which search key to use.
2. When to use a multi-attribute (composite) index and which search keys to use.
Table 4.1 I/O Time Comparison for Example Queries 4.1 and 4.2
High-selectivitiy Query (4.1)
Join Strategy Range of Performance Best Performance
Nested-loop join 112–290 seconds ...