| Practice 19 | Spin a Story |
Your boss’s boss steps into the elevator. “You work on the back-end stuff, don’t you?” You nod and smile. “So maybe you can tell me: why am I paying for four times the amount of storage than we need to hold our data?”
You think for a second: “Oh, it’s the extra space we need for all the indexes.”
“So what’s an index, and why am I paying for it?”
Now this is a question you can answer.
An index is a mapping between the values in one or more columns in a relationship to the row or rows that contain those values. The index is hashed or sorted to make access fast, and once you find a value in an index, you can get straight to the rows with those values in the given columns.
You stop talking and smile. This was just like a ...
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