Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Creating Indexes

The same format is used no matter which type of index you are creating.

Create unique|bitmap index <index name> on
<table name> (col1, col2, col3,…); 

A unique index was covered in the discussion of constraints as well as uses to both speed queries and enforce that each value in the column is unique. 

create unique index auth_contract on  author(author_contract_nbr);

create bitmap index bk_auth on
  book_author(book_key, author_key); 

create index half_sales on
  sales (quantity/2); 

If you do not define the type of index, the database creates a non-unique b-tree index. 

If you decide that you want to change an index, from unique to non-unique for example, you have to drop the current index and recreate it in the new type.  You can rebuild indexes using the ALTER INDEX command.  When you rebuild an index, the database uses the current index if it is valid to create the new index.  Once the new index is created, the old index is dropped. 

If you specify online, the database will continue to use the old index until the new one is completed and then switches to the new index.  You can also use the rebuild to move the index to another tablespace.

alter index bk_auth rebuild online;
alter index bk_auth rebuild tablespace indx_ts;

If the current index is not valid, then the database rebuilds the index from the original table.  Invalid indexes are not used.  An index becomes invalid when the rowids in the index no longer match the rowids in the table.  If I rebuild a table, all the indexes created on that table will be marked invalid and must be rebuilt.

As a last point on indexes, you must be careful in indexing your database.  Each index adds overhead, having to be updated with every change to that column in the table.  If your database uses static data and only select queries, then over indexing will not hurt performance.  But, most databases have a mix of INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs and SELECTs.  Too many indexes can have a significant negative impact on INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs.

There are many other objects in the Oracle database, but we are focusing on those that impact SQL.  Most of the other objects belong in the realm of the DBA and are beyond the scope of this book.

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