Can any one give a quick overview about Column Store Index and Row Store Index?
I have searched over the internet and got confused, they say an Index can be applied to a Field(Column), while they also say there exist a row store index?
Need clarification.
Many thanks!
In SQL Server, prior to 2012 all indexes were row-store, you specify what fields you want to index, and the value of the rows are evaluated to improve performance (over-simplified). These indexes speed up finding/filtering rows.
Columnstore indexes introduced to SQL Server in 2012, also require you to specify what fields you want to index (Microsoft recommends including all fields in a Columnstore index). These indexes aren't like traditional indexes, they're more like pre-aggregated statistics.
More in-depth descriptions of the index types are available, but your basic confusion seemed to be row vs column. All indexes are applied to columns, but how the index works and what it stores is different between the two types.
Related
I have a large table in Microsoft SQL Server 2008. It has two indexes. One index having column A descending order and another index having the column A ascending with some other columns.
My application is doing below:
Select for the record.
If there is no record then insert
If find then update the records
Note that this table has millions of records.
The question is: Are these indexes affect the any select/insert/update performance?
Any suggestions?
Having the exact same two indexes with the only difference being the ordering will make no difference to the SQL engine and will just pick either (practially).
Imagine you 2 dictionaries of the english language, one sorts words from A to Z and the other from Z to A. The effort you will need to search for a particular word will be roughly the same in both cases.
A different case would be if you had 2 lists of people's data, one ordered by first name then last name and the other by last name first, then first name. If you have to look for "John Doe", the one that's ordered first by last name will be practically useless compared to the other one.
These examples are very simplified representations of indexes on SQL Server. Indexes store their data on a structure that's called a B-Tree, but for searching purposes these examples work to understand when will a index be useful or not.
Resuming: you can drop the first index and keep the one that has additional columns on it, since it can be used for more different scenarios and also all cases that would require the other one. Keeping an unuseful index brings additional maintenance tasks like keeping the index updated on every insert, update, delete and refreshing statistics, so you might want to drop it.
PD: As for the 2nd index being used, this greatly depends on the query you are using to access that particular table, it's joins and where clauses. You can use the "Display Estimated Execution Plan" having highlighted the query on SSMS to see the access plan of the engine to each object to perform the operation. If the index is used, you will see it there.
Thanks for all the answers. I explored the SQL Server Profiler and SQL Tuning Advisor for the SQL Server and ran them to get the recommended indexes. It recommended a single index with include options. I used the index and the performance has been improved.
I'd appreciate some advice from SQL Server gurus here. Let me explain...
I have an SQL Server 2008 database table that has 21 columns. Here's a quick type of those:
INT Primary Key
Several other INT's that are indexes already (used to reference this and other tables)
Several NVARCHAR(64) to hold user-provided text
Several NVARCHAR(256) to hold longer user-provided text
Several DATETIME2
One BIGINT
Several UNIQUEIDENTIFIER, one is already an index
The way this table is used is that it is presented to a user as a sortable table and a user can choose which column to sort it by. This table may contain many thousands of records (like currently it does 21,000 and it will be growing.)
So my question is, do I need to set each column as an INDEX to enable faster sorting?
PS. Forgot to say. The output obviously supports pagination, so the user sees no more than 100 rows at once.
Contrary to popular belief, just having an index on a column does not guarantee that any queries will be any faster!
If you constantly use SELECT *.. from that table, these non-clustered indices on a single column will most likely not be used at all.
A good nonclustered index is a covering index, which means, it contains all the necessary columns to satisfy one or multiple given queries. If you have this situation, then a nonclustered index can make sense - otherwise, in more cases than not, the nonclustered index is likely to be ignored by the query optimizer. The reason for this being: if you need all the columns anyway, the query would have to do key lookups from the nonclustered index into the actual data (the clustered index) for each row found - and the key lookup is a very expensive operation, so doing this for a lots of hits becomes overly costly, and the query optimizer will rather quickly switch to a index scan (possibly the clustered index scan) to fetch the data.
Don't over-index - use a well-designed clustered index, put indices on the foreign key columns to speed up joins - and then let it be for the time being. Observe your system, measure performance, maybe add an index here or there - but don't just overload the system with tons of indices!
Having too many indices can be worse than having none - every index must be maintained, e.g. updated for each INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statement - does that take time!
this table is ... presented to a user as a sortable table ... [that] may contain many thousands of records
If you're ordering many thousands of records for display, you're doing it wrong. Typical users can reasonably process at most around 500 typical records. Exceptional users can handle a couple thousand. Any more than that, and you're misleading your users into a false sense that they've seen a representative sample. This results in poor decision making and inefficient user workflow. Instead, you need to focus on a good search algorithm.
Another to keep in mind here is that more indexes means slower inserts and updates. It's a balancing act. Sql Server keeps statistics on what queries and sorts it actually performs, and makes those statistics available to you. There are queries you can run that tell you exactly what indexes Sql Server thinks it could use. I would deploy without any sorting index and let it run for a week or two that way. Then look at data and see what users actually sort on and index just those columns.
Take a look at this link for an example and introduction on finding missing indexes:
http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Find_Missing_Indexes
Generally indexes use to accelerate WHERE conditions (in some cases JOINS). so I don't thinks create index on column except PRIMARY KEY accelerate sorting. you can do your sorting in clients(if you use win forms or wpf) or in database for web scenarios
Good Luck
I have a table with ~200 million rows and ~15 columns in it. I am planning to create the column store index on my table. Will there be any change in performance based on the order of columns that I use in the column store index? If Yes, what is the logic behind it?
The most important aspect is to add ALL of the columns to the Columnstore index. I spoke to the MSFT product team about this, because I was skeptical about the claim that the 'column order doesn't matter'. But they confirmed that, so long as you add all of the table's columns, this is true.
I also tried partial columnstore indexes (i.e. adding only a subset of columns), while I was able to get the queries I tested to use that columnstore index, clearly the Query Optimizer is not built for this scenario, as the execution plans will be inconsitant and not always optimal, i.e. use columnstore and non-columnstore indices, etc..
No, it doesn't make any difference.
No, the column order does not matter, also add all the columns you need to the Column Store Index for all your use cases as there can be only 1 column store index, it will not hurt the performance.
It doesn't.
I just created 2 hours ago a columnstore index for my Fact Table and the query cost (relative to the batch) is now 14% with index and 86% without index. I think it's pretty good. Execution Plan below.
You can use "OPTION (IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX)" when you run the query to compare
http://uploadimage.ro/img.php?image=4508_execution_plan_sk6y.png
Also, when is it appropriate to use one?
An index is used to speed up searching in the database. MySQL has some good documentation on the subject (which is relevant for other SQL servers as well):
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-indexes.html
An index can be used to efficiently find all rows matching some column in your query and then walk through only that subset of the table to find exact matches. If you don't have indexes on any column in the WHERE clause, the SQL server has to walk through the whole table and check every row to see if it matches, which may be a slow operation on big tables.
The index can also be a UNIQUE index, which means that you cannot have duplicate values in that column, or a PRIMARY KEY which in some storage engines defines where in the database file the value is stored.
In MySQL you can use EXPLAIN in front of your SELECT statement to see if your query will make use of any index. This is a good start for troubleshooting performance problems. Read more here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/explain.html
A clustered index is like the contents of a phone book. You can open the book at 'Hilditch, David' and find all the information for all of the 'Hilditch's right next to each other. Here the keys for the clustered index are (lastname, firstname).
This makes clustered indexes great for retrieving lots of data based on range based queries since all the data is located next to each other.
Since the clustered index is actually related to how the data is stored, there is only one of them possible per table (although you can cheat to simulate multiple clustered indexes).
A non-clustered index is different in that you can have many of them and they then point at the data in the clustered index. You could have e.g. a non-clustered index at the back of a phone book which is keyed on (town, address)
Imagine if you had to search through the phone book for all the people who live in 'London' - with only the clustered index you would have to search every single item in the phone book since the key on the clustered index is on (lastname, firstname) and as a result the people living in London are scattered randomly throughout the index.
If you have a non-clustered index on (town) then these queries can be performed much more quickly.
An index is used to speed up the performance of queries. It does this by reducing the number of database data pages that have to be visited/scanned.
In SQL Server, a clustered index determines the physical order of data in a table. There can be only one clustered index per table (the clustered index IS the table). All other indexes on a table are termed non-clustered.
SQL Server Index Basics
SQL Server Indexes: The Basics
SQL Server Indexes
Index Basics
Index (wiki)
Indexes are all about finding data quickly.
Indexes in a database are analogous to indexes that you find in a book. If a book has an index, and I ask you to find a chapter in that book, you can quickly find that with the help of the index. On the other hand, if the book does not have an index, you will have to spend more time looking for the chapter by looking at every page from the start to the end of the book.
In a similar fashion, indexes in a database can help queries find data quickly. If you are new to indexes, the following videos, can be very useful. In fact, I have learned a lot from them.
Index Basics
Clustered and Non-Clustered Indexes
Unique and Non-Unique Indexes
Advantages and disadvantages of indexes
Well in general index is a B-tree. There are two types of indexes: clustered and nonclustered.
Clustered index creates a physical order of rows (it can be only one and in most cases it is also a primary key - if you create primary key on table you create clustered index on this table also).
Nonclustered index is also a binary tree but it doesn't create a physical order of rows. So the leaf nodes of nonclustered index contain PK (if it exists) or row index.
Indexes are used to increase the speed of search. Because the complexity is of O(log N). Indexes is very large and interesting topic. I can say that creating indexes on large database is some kind of art sometimes.
INDEXES - to find data easily
UNIQUE INDEX - duplicate values are not allowed
Syntax for INDEX
CREATE INDEX INDEX_NAME ON TABLE_NAME(COLUMN);
Syntax for UNIQUE INDEX
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX INDEX_NAME ON TABLE_NAME(COLUMN);
First we need to understand how normal (without indexing) query runs. It basically traverse each rows one by one and when it finds the data it returns. Refer the following image. (This image has been taken from this video.)
So suppose query is to find 50 , it will have to read 49 records as a linear search.
Refer the following image. (This image has been taken from this video)
When we apply indexing, the query will quickly find out the data without reading each one of them just by eliminating half of the data in each traversal like a binary search. The mysql indexes are stored as B-tree where all the data are in leaf node.
INDEX is a performance optimization technique that speeds up the data retrieval process. It is a persistent data structure that is associated with a Table (or View) in order to increase performance during retrieving the data from that table (or View).
Index based search is applied more particularly when your queries include WHERE filter. Otherwise, i.e, a query without WHERE-filter selects whole data and process. Searching whole table without INDEX is called Table-scan.
You will find exact information for Sql-Indexes in clear and reliable way:
follow these links:
For cocnept-wise understanding:
http://dotnetauthorities.blogspot.in/2013/12/Microsoft-SQL-Server-Training-Online-Learning-Classes-INDEX-Overview-and-Optimizations.html
For implementation-wise understanding:
http://dotnetauthorities.blogspot.in/2013/12/Microsoft-SQL-Server-Training-Online-Learning-Classes-INDEX-Creation-Deletetion-Optimizations.html
If you're using SQL Server, one of the best resources is its own Books Online that comes with the install! It's the 1st place I would refer to for ANY SQL Server related topics.
If it's practical "how should I do this?" kind of questions, then StackOverflow would be a better place to ask.
Also, I haven't been back for a while but sqlservercentral.com used to be one of the top SQL Server related sites out there.
An index is used for several different reasons. The main reason is to speed up querying so that you can get rows or sort rows faster. Another reason is to define a primary-key or unique index which will guarantee that no other columns have the same values.
So, How indexing actually works?
Well, first off, the database table does not reorder itself when we put index on a column to optimize the query performance.
An index is a data structure, (most commonly its B-tree {Its balanced tree, not binary tree}) that stores the value for a specific column in a table.
The major advantage of B-tree is that the data in it is sortable. Along with it, B-Tree data structure is time efficient and operations such as searching, insertion, deletion can be done in logarithmic time.
So the index would look like this -
Here for each column, it would be mapped with a database internal identifier (pointer) which points to the exact location of the row. And, now if we run the same query.
Visual Representation of the Query execution
So, indexing just cuts down the time complexity from o(n) to o(log n).
A detailed info - https://pankajtanwar.in/blog/what-is-the-sorting-algorithm-behind-order-by-query-in-mysql
INDEX is not part of SQL. INDEX creates a Balanced Tree on physical level to accelerate CRUD.
SQL is a language which describe the Conceptual Level Schema and External Level Schema. SQL doesn't describe Physical Level Schema.
The statement which creates an INDEX is defined by DBMS, not by SQL standard.
An index is an on-disk structure associated with a table or view that speeds retrieval of rows from the table or view. An index contains keys built from one or more columns in the table or view. These keys are stored in a structure (B-tree) that enables SQL Server to find the row or rows associated with the key values quickly and efficiently.
Indexes are automatically created when PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints are defined on table columns. For example, when you create a table with a UNIQUE constraint, Database Engine automatically creates a nonclustered index.
If you configure a PRIMARY KEY, Database Engine automatically creates a clustered index, unless a clustered index already exists. When you try to enforce a PRIMARY KEY constraint on an existing table and a clustered index already exists on that table, SQL Server enforces the primary key using a nonclustered index.
Please refer to this for more information about indexes (clustered and non clustered):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/indexes/clustered-and-nonclustered-indexes-described?view=sql-server-ver15
Hope this helps!
What are the different types of indexes, what are the benefits of each?
I heard of covering and clustered indexes, are there more? Where would you use them?
Unique - Guarantees unique values for the column(or set of columns) included in the index
Covering - Includes all of the columns that are used in a particular query (or set of queries), allowing the database to use only the index and not actually have to look at the table data to retrieve the results
Clustered - This is way in which the actual data is ordered on the disk, which means if a query uses the clustered index for looking up the values, it does not have to take the additional step of looking up the actual table row for any data not included in the index.
OdeToCode has a good article covering the basic differences
As it says in the article:
Proper indexes are crucial for good
performance in large databases.
Sometimes you can make up for a poorly
written query with a good index, but
it can be hard to make up for poor
indexing with even the best queries.
Quite true, too... If you're just starting out with it, I'd focus on clustered and composite indexes, since they'll probably be what you use the most.
I'll add a couple of index types
BITMAP - when you have very low number of different possible values, very fast and doesn't take up much space
PARTITIONED - allows the index to be partitioned based on some property usually advantageous on very large database objects for storage or performance reasons.
FUNCTION/EXPRESSION indexes - used to pre-calculate some value based on the table and store it in the index, a very simple example might be an index based on lower() or a substring function.
PostgreSQL allows partial indexes, where only rows that match a predicate are indexed. For instance, you might want to index the customer table for only those records which are active. This might look something like:
create index i on customers (id, name, whatever) where is_active is true;
If your index many columns, and you have many inactive customers, this can be a big win in terms of space (the index will be stored in fewer disk pages) and thus performance. To hit the index you need to, at a minimum, specify the predicate:
select name from customers where is_active is true;
Conventional wisdom suggests that index choice should be based on cardinality. They'll say,
For a low cardinality column like GENDER, use bitmap. For a high cardinality like LAST_NAME, use b-tree.
This is not the case with Oracle, where index choice should instead be based on the type of application (OLTP vs. OLAP). DML on tables with bitmap indexes can cause serious lock contention. On the other hand, the Oracle CBO can easily combine multiple bitmap indexes together, and bitmap indexes can be used to search for nulls. As a general rule:
For an OLTP system with frequent DML and routine queries, use btree. For an OLAP system with infrequent DML and adhoc queries, use bitmap.
I'm not sure if this applies to other databases, comments are welcome. The following articles discuss the subject further:
Bitmap Index vs. B-tree Index: Which and When?
Understanding Bitmap Indexes
Different database systems have different names for the same type of index, so be careful with this. For example, what SQL Server and Sybase call "clustered index" is called in Oracle an "index-organised table".
I suggest you search the blogs of Jason Massie (http://statisticsio.com/) and Brent Ozar (http://www.brentozar.com/) for related info. They have some post about real-life scenario that deals with indexes.
Oracle has various combinations of b-tree, bitmap, partitioned and non-partitioned, reverse byte, bitmap join, and domain indexes.
Here's a link to the 11gR1 documentation on the subject: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28274/data_acc.htm#PFGRF004
Unique
cluster
non-cluster
column store
Index with included column
index on computed column
filtered
spatial
xml
full text
SQL Server 2008 has filtered indexes, similar to PostgreSQL's partial indexes. Both allow to include in index only rows matching specified criteria.
The syntax is identical to PostgreSQL:
create index i on Customers(name) where is_alive = cast(1 as bit);
To view the types of indexes and its meaning visits:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175049.aspx