Customer Reviews

Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am an experienced software developer who has designed some fairly sophisticated databases. However, I have not had a lot of training regarding index design and have had DBAs to back me up in case I needed better indexing. Now I don't have a DBA to fall back on and I am having some performance issues on a specific report in one of my databases. How do I resolve the problem? By carefully reading this book.

Index design is not easy, especially when there are many tables involved, joined together in a variety of interesting ways. However, this book helped me understand the core issues of index design. It also helped me understand how to estimate the cost of different indexing strategies. Throughout the book, the authors did a good job of being consistent in their treatment of the topic. I am armed, ready to tackle my report performance issue!

Gold is heavy. If you are a student (or a professor) with no practical knowledge in real-life large database tuning, this book is quite heavy. It may not be the best for you. But, instead, if you are a hands-on professional, here you can find such knowledge that seldomly becomes published.
If you are a DBA who think you already read everything worth to know about indexing, don't miss this book.

The authors don't try to sell you any simplified tricks.
The book describes a solid methodology, how to diagnose the performance problems and how to do proactive and reactive tuning.
The text is dense, but it makes sense. The examples are clear.

In addition to the actual DBA work, the book builds up an idea of a quality assurance system. In principle, the software developers could be tought a reasonable set of rules-fo-thumb. The goal is to avoid the worst performance pitfalls.

This is an exceptional book on how indexes work in a generic relational database. The authors only pay attention to the principles, not to any particular vendor and this is seldom seen.

The book takes a very pragmatic approach to speeding up SQL SELECTs, it's all about making SELECTs fast. One more thing to notice about this book is that authors talk about tables that contain tens of millions of rows and queries that could take hours (or forever) in the worst case. Compare this to some other SQL performance optimization books that talk about tens of thousands of rows. Sure there is a huge difference in approaches.

Now, why SELECTs could be slow ? Surprise, huge data volume plus limited hardware capacity. How to overcome this ? Surprise, by proper indexing. We all know that.

But ! What exactly a good index is, how to build a good index or improve an existing one, how to estimate the quality of an existing index, how to estimate the query execution time with this or that access path, how the optimizer chooses its ways, which predicates affect it's decisions in which way, how to monitor the database activity and determine what to improve, how indexes wear out with time - this book discusses in a very simple, clear and pragmatical way.

The book gives a clear view of the current state with indexing relational databases. It shows you the principles but does not give any rules of thumb, you still have to understand what you are doing and what are the implications, rather than blindly following the textbook.

And it seriously shifts the way you look at indexes, at least it was so in my case.

This is an invaluable book, but it should be accompanied with a good and very deep tuning guide for your own database of choice. If read alone, it leaves you empty handed, because you wouldn't know where to look in your own database. And if that other guide is not deep enough, it would be a useless companion.

An amazing book for a thinking DBA.

Finally a book about database indexing!
I have read numerous books on database design and performance and they usually emphasize the importance of index design. And then only a few pages general and out-of-date rules.
This book is a must for every DBA and database programmer! It describes indexing in a very clear manner and is a good combination of theory and practise.
I already have speeded up a few applications and what's best: just by indexes - no need to change application source code!

Apparently the authors have many years of experience in this industry involving solving main-frame era DB2 arcane indexing issues. I salute for that.

The book gives a closer look at indexes generically means one size fits all databases view point. In reality some database products since have much evolved such that the examples given in some chapters on real world index tuning dramas in mainframe era have become a thing of the past.
The latest RDBMS product shows such index issues by a simple right click by a lame duck person on a slow query issue. And it may also suggest adding a new index or modifying an existing index to the pin point or closer HOW GOOD is THAT? This just really surprised me a lot.

Also the book targets two different dominant database products in the market. Some of the concepts and points are just too hard to decipher may be because it sort of biased on Oracle reader? The book is certainly not for the SQL server beginner designers.

If the book is based on a particular database product say Oracle or SQL Server it would have definitely be a winner for a larger segment of readers out there mainly concentrating on one product. It is highly unlikely large enterprises use both products!!!

Again a generic book for the two dominant database products may not be useful as SQL Server is what I use and some of the features like index book marking look up etc. and SQL profiler under the hood query optimization techniques adds so much to the equation that we are trying to solve.

Also have to mention the example codes what they meant for? All are coded using cursors it is just a bit 'off the track' of real world situations as cursors are discouraged. If the answer is the cursors are used to highlight a pure indexing point then sadly the moment the cursor was dropped and re-designed the query then SQL server brings in all the other profiler based query tuning variables.

Apart from the above issues I spent a lot of time reading and grabbing 'basics' of index design. It was hard for me though I managed to get some ideas from this book into production. And searching through Amazon for similar books it is only this book I found that trying to isolate indexing as a separate entity from whole database design and query design subject. This reason is why I am giving it a four star.

This is a lil bit costly book but has very good information about the subject. Authors did a good job.

The book is database neutral and do not use any complex terms.

You learn what is costly in executing a query, and how to do a fast estimate. This way, you can easily evaluate different indexes, and know which one is better.

So contain many recipes, including how to determine best index for a specific query.