From the course: Advanced SQL for Application Development

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Overview of index types

Overview of index types

From the course: Advanced SQL for Application Development

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Overview of index types

- [Instructor] When it comes to developing efficient relational database applications, one of the most important tools we have to work with are indexes. So let's take a look at different kinds of indexes that we have available to us. So first I want to go over basic idea behind an index. An index is a data structure and its purpose is to improve the time or to reduce the time it takes to access data that we're actually interested in. You can think of indexes as a set of keys and values, where the key is an attribute of the row that we want to retrieve. So that could be a primary key, it could be an attribute like the name in a customer table or the product type in a product table. And then there's the value. The value, in this case, is a location as to where we can retrieve the data we're interested in. Now typically, that means where the location of the row is on a particular data block. Now I want to mention I will use…

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