Self Indexing Databases
IT Chapters July 20th, 2006Storing data in a database seems like a simple task. The tables are created and your data is added/edited/deleted as required. But beyond this is the need to make sure your tables are properly indexed to make sure that commonly accessed tables/fields are responsive to queries. Creating indices borders on an art or even black magic in some cases and it is up to the DBA to chose the correct indices to create.
But why can current databases not decide on which indices are the best for your particular solution? We do have the turning wizard in SQL Server 2005 but surely this should be an automatic task that the database can perform. Coding Horror continues the dicussion on this interesting topic.
July 20th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
The biggest danger with a self index tuning database would be that programmers would become lazy… very lazy… Rather let them work out why their query takes 3 months to complete while they are developing the application, rather than while in production.
July 20th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Fair point. But in production, why spend a week trying to work out your bottlenecks and just let the database self adjust as the load increases/decreases.
Maybe a set base of indices and let the database self configure from then on within certain limits?