- Hardcover: 328 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell (16 Sep 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0471719994
- ISBN-13: 978-0471719991
- Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 1.9 x 24.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 918,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers
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Product Description
Review
"I recommend this book to all those who have anything to do with database performance. It is a must–read for all database administrations, database designers, performance–tuning specialists, and application programmers…" (Computing Reviews.com, November 20, 2005)
Product Description
Improve the performance of relational databases with indexes designed for today′s hardware
Over the last few years, hardware and software have advanced beyond all recognition, so it′s hardly surprising that relational database performance now receives much less attention. Unfortunately, the reality is that the improved hardware hasn′t kept pace with the ever–increasing quantity of data processed today. Although disk packing densities have increased enormously, making storage costs extremely low and sequential read very fast, random reads are still painfully slow. Many of the old design recommendations are therefore no longer valid–the optimal point of indexing has come a long way. Consequently many of the old problems haven′t actually gone away–they have simply changed their appearance.
This book provides an easy but effective approach to the design of indexes and tables. Using lots of examples and case studies, the authors describe how the DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server optimizers determine how to access data, and how CPU and response times for the resulting access paths can be quickly estimated. This enables comparisons to be made of the various designs, and helps you choose available choices for the most appropriate design.
This book is intended for anyone who wants to understand the issues of SQL performance or how to design tables and indexes effectively. With this title, readers with many years of experience of relational systems will be able to better grasp the implications that have been brought into play by the introduction of new hardware.
An Instructor′s Manual presenting detailed solutions to all the problems in the book is available online from the Wiley editorial department.
An Instructor Support FTP site is also available.
Over the last few years, hardware and software have advanced beyond all recognition, so it′s hardly surprising that relational database performance now receives much less attention. Unfortunately, the reality is that the improved hardware hasn′t kept pace with the ever–increasing quantity of data processed today. Although disk packing densities have increased enormously, making storage costs extremely low and sequential read very fast, random reads are still painfully slow. Many of the old design recommendations are therefore no longer valid–the optimal point of indexing has come a long way. Consequently many of the old problems haven′t actually gone away–they have simply changed their appearance.
This book provides an easy but effective approach to the design of indexes and tables. Using lots of examples and case studies, the authors describe how the DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server optimizers determine how to access data, and how CPU and response times for the resulting access paths can be quickly estimated. This enables comparisons to be made of the various designs, and helps you choose available choices for the most appropriate design.
This book is intended for anyone who wants to understand the issues of SQL performance or how to design tables and indexes effectively. With this title, readers with many years of experience of relational systems will be able to better grasp the implications that have been brought into play by the introduction of new hardware.
An Instructor′s Manual presenting detailed solutions to all the problems in the book is available online from the Wiley editorial department.
An Instructor Support FTP site is also available.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Relational databases have been around now for over 20 years, and that's precisely how long performance problems have been around too-and yet here is another book on the subject. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Relational databases have been around now for over 20 years, and that's precisely how long performance problems have been around too-and yet here is another book on the subject. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Before I start commenting on this book, I should point out that I have been using, running, designing, or trouble-shooting Oracle database systems for most of the last 20 years - but the authors have a background in DB2.
Having made said that, the difference in RDBMS really doesn't matter. If you are responsible for making databases perform well you should read this book.
It tells you why you need to create indexes - and the answer is a little more subtle than just "to make things go faster"; it tells you how to decide on the columns to include in your indexes; it tells you how to choose the best order for those columns; and it describes the compromises you make between a reasonable set of pretty good indexes and the complete set of ideal indexes
Experienced DBAs may read this book and decide that it's not telling them anything new. Even if you fall into this group, don't use that as an excuse for putting the book to one side. The clarity of explanation, the rational justification, and the numerical approximation methods supplied by this book should give you a better insight - hence greater effectiveness - into what may at present be an intuitive approach to deciding on indexing strategies.
The book gives you useful models for working out the benefit of adding, or modifying, an index in terms of how much work you do as you walk through the index and visit the table. It gives you a simple system for classifying an index with one, two, or three stars, and then offers an insight into when you may or may not,want to create the ideal index for a query.
Specifically for the Oracle practitioner, I found a few minor details that required a slight mental adjustment: the authors tend to talk about 4Kb block sizes with relatively large index entries whereas many Oracle systems tend to use 8Kb block sizes with relatively small index entries; there were points where the experienced Oracle DBA would want to think about allowing for the background workload due to UNDO and REDO; there were details where I could see some difference between DB2 and Oracle technology; and the authors also have a section discussing when to rebuild indexes (an activity generally viewed as anathema in the Oracle world).
Given the common Oracle view about index rebuilding - and my background - I feel it is important to say that the authors' arguments are perfectly sound, and I would be quite happy to follow their guidelines; but I would only expect the argument to apply to a very small percentage of the indexes in a typical Oracle (OLTP) system. This is because there was one detail that I thought needed to be raised more explicitly - despite being implicit in a large fraction of the writing - the authors' were talking about small blocks with large index entries for indexes that have been engineered so that critical queries did most of their work IN THE INDEX, making "one more random block read" a significant fraction of the total workload.
These are minor details, though, that have no impact on the general principles; at most they move the boundary line at which you decide whether the cost of any structural change is worth the benefit offered by that change.
In summary - any DBA should read this book if they need to get better performance from a badly indexed database.
Having made said that, the difference in RDBMS really doesn't matter. If you are responsible for making databases perform well you should read this book.
It tells you why you need to create indexes - and the answer is a little more subtle than just "to make things go faster"; it tells you how to decide on the columns to include in your indexes; it tells you how to choose the best order for those columns; and it describes the compromises you make between a reasonable set of pretty good indexes and the complete set of ideal indexes
Experienced DBAs may read this book and decide that it's not telling them anything new. Even if you fall into this group, don't use that as an excuse for putting the book to one side. The clarity of explanation, the rational justification, and the numerical approximation methods supplied by this book should give you a better insight - hence greater effectiveness - into what may at present be an intuitive approach to deciding on indexing strategies.
The book gives you useful models for working out the benefit of adding, or modifying, an index in terms of how much work you do as you walk through the index and visit the table. It gives you a simple system for classifying an index with one, two, or three stars, and then offers an insight into when you may or may not,want to create the ideal index for a query.
Specifically for the Oracle practitioner, I found a few minor details that required a slight mental adjustment: the authors tend to talk about 4Kb block sizes with relatively large index entries whereas many Oracle systems tend to use 8Kb block sizes with relatively small index entries; there were points where the experienced Oracle DBA would want to think about allowing for the background workload due to UNDO and REDO; there were details where I could see some difference between DB2 and Oracle technology; and the authors also have a section discussing when to rebuild indexes (an activity generally viewed as anathema in the Oracle world).
Given the common Oracle view about index rebuilding - and my background - I feel it is important to say that the authors' arguments are perfectly sound, and I would be quite happy to follow their guidelines; but I would only expect the argument to apply to a very small percentage of the indexes in a typical Oracle (OLTP) system. This is because there was one detail that I thought needed to be raised more explicitly - despite being implicit in a large fraction of the writing - the authors' were talking about small blocks with large index entries for indexes that have been engineered so that critical queries did most of their work IN THE INDEX, making "one more random block read" a significant fraction of the total workload.
These are minor details, though, that have no impact on the general principles; at most they move the boundary line at which you decide whether the cost of any structural change is worth the benefit offered by that change.
In summary - any DBA should read this book if they need to get better performance from a badly indexed database.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Good book on index design
20 Sep 2007
Format:Hardcover
I am an experienced software developer who has designed some fairly sophisticated databases. However, I have not had a lot of training regarding index design and have had DBAs to back me up in case I needed better indexing. Now I don't have a DBA to fall back on and I am having some performance issues on a specific report in one of my databases. How do I resolve the problem? By carefully reading this book.
Index design is not easy, especially when there are many tables involved, joined together in a variety of interesting ways. However, this book helped me understand the core issues of index design. It also helped me understand how to estimate the cost of different indexing strategies. Throughout the book, the authors did a good job of being consistent in their treatment of the topic. I am armed, ready to tackle my report performance issue!
Index design is not easy, especially when there are many tables involved, joined together in a variety of interesting ways. However, this book helped me understand the core issues of index design. It also helped me understand how to estimate the cost of different indexing strategies. Throughout the book, the authors did a good job of being consistent in their treatment of the topic. I am armed, ready to tackle my report performance issue!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Diving deep into expert knowledge
1 Dec 2005
Format:Hardcover
Gold is heavy. If you are a student (or a professor) with no practical knowledge in real-life large database tuning, this book is quite heavy. It may not be the best for you. But, instead, if you are a hands-on professional, here you can find such knowledge that seldomly becomes published.
If you are a DBA who think you already read everything worth to know about indexing, don't miss this book.
The authors don't try to sell you any simplified tricks.
The book describes a solid methodology, how to diagnose the performance problems and how to do proactive and reactive tuning.
The text is dense, but it makes sense. The examples are clear.
In addition to the actual DBA work, the book builds up an idea of a quality assurance system. In principle, the software developers could be tought a reasonable set of rules-fo-thumb. The goal is to avoid the worst performance pitfalls.
If you are a DBA who think you already read everything worth to know about indexing, don't miss this book.
The authors don't try to sell you any simplified tricks.
The book describes a solid methodology, how to diagnose the performance problems and how to do proactive and reactive tuning.
The text is dense, but it makes sense. The examples are clear.
In addition to the actual DBA work, the book builds up an idea of a quality assurance system. In principle, the software developers could be tought a reasonable set of rules-fo-thumb. The goal is to avoid the worst performance pitfalls.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A book of choice... or may be a book of SELECT ?
8 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover
This is an exceptional book on how indexes work in a generic relational database. The authors only pay attention to the principles, not to any particular vendor and this is seldom seen.
The book takes a very pragmatic approach to speeding up SQL SELECTs, it's all about making SELECTs fast. One more thing to notice about this book is that authors talk about tables that contain tens of millions of rows and queries that could take hours (or forever) in the worst case. Compare this to some other SQL performance optimization books that talk about tens of thousands of rows. Sure there is a huge difference in approaches.
Now, why SELECTs could be slow ? Surprise, huge data volume plus limited hardware capacity. How to overcome this ? Surprise, by proper indexing. We all know that.
But ! What exactly a good index is, how to build a good index or improve an existing one, how to estimate the quality of an existing index, how to estimate the query execution time with this or that access path, how the optimizer chooses its ways, which predicates affect it's decisions in which way, how to monitor the database activity and determine what to improve, how indexes wear out with time - this book discusses in a very simple, clear and pragmatical way.
The book gives a clear view of the current state with indexing relational databases. It shows you the principles but does not give any rules of thumb, you still have to understand what you are doing and what are the implications, rather than blindly following the textbook.
And it seriously shifts the way you look at indexes, at least it was so in my case.
This is an invaluable book, but it should be accompanied with a good and very deep tuning guide for your own database of choice. If read alone, it leaves you empty handed, because you wouldn't know where to look in your own database. And if that other guide is not deep enough, it would be a useless companion.
An amazing book for a thinking DBA.
The book takes a very pragmatic approach to speeding up SQL SELECTs, it's all about making SELECTs fast. One more thing to notice about this book is that authors talk about tables that contain tens of millions of rows and queries that could take hours (or forever) in the worst case. Compare this to some other SQL performance optimization books that talk about tens of thousands of rows. Sure there is a huge difference in approaches.
Now, why SELECTs could be slow ? Surprise, huge data volume plus limited hardware capacity. How to overcome this ? Surprise, by proper indexing. We all know that.
But ! What exactly a good index is, how to build a good index or improve an existing one, how to estimate the quality of an existing index, how to estimate the query execution time with this or that access path, how the optimizer chooses its ways, which predicates affect it's decisions in which way, how to monitor the database activity and determine what to improve, how indexes wear out with time - this book discusses in a very simple, clear and pragmatical way.
The book gives a clear view of the current state with indexing relational databases. It shows you the principles but does not give any rules of thumb, you still have to understand what you are doing and what are the implications, rather than blindly following the textbook.
And it seriously shifts the way you look at indexes, at least it was so in my case.
This is an invaluable book, but it should be accompanied with a good and very deep tuning guide for your own database of choice. If read alone, it leaves you empty handed, because you wouldn't know where to look in your own database. And if that other guide is not deep enough, it would be a useless companion.
An amazing book for a thinking DBA.
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