From the course: Database Foundations: Data Structures

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Table indexes

Table indexes

From the course: Database Foundations: Data Structures

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Table indexes

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- [Instructor] Databases are built to store data so that information is available at a later point in time. When you have a lot of stored data, it's important to be able to quickly locate the specific rows that you're after, and adding indexes to your tables can help the RDBMS in that search. Indexes in a relational database work in exactly the same way as indexes at the back of a school textbook. Rather than page through the entire book from beginning to end, you can find a topic of interest listed alphabetically in the index, and it'll point you directly to the pages with the content that you're interested in. Relational databases store data in the same way with index is made up of the key values from your tables. This allows the database engine to search the index, which will be point to the area on disk where the rest of the information for the row is actually stored. Database indexes can take several forms, but the…

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