[Babase] Speeding up large tables

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Sun Mar 29 16:38:12 EDT 2009


On 03/29/2009 03:06:59 PM, Catherine Markham wrote:
> An index as in a unique ID?  That'll somehow help speed up the  
> upload, querying, or both?

An index on any column that you will be searching on
or comparing against (including any columns you will
be using in a join) will speed up querying, immensely.
Even better if when you create the index you can
tell the database that the indexed value will
be unique.  Indexes will also greatly speed up
sorting.

Depending on what you're doing an index can
speed queries and sorting by a factor of 1,000
or more.

You can index on more than one column at a time, but
usually it makes the most sense to put a separate
index on every column that needs it.

Adding indexes will slow down uploads.  For that reason
it's often best to add the index after doing the
initial upload.  Indexes also take up disk space.

> 
> Thanks for the tip!
> Catherine
> 
> Karl O. Pinc wrote:
>> Catherine,
>> 
>> You probably want to put some indexes on your
>> big tables.  It will make things much, much
>> faster.

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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