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As an IT educator, I think it's better if people understand how indexes work at a higher level. Then you have something, even if you forget how an R-tree works
by elchief 9y ago
As an IT educator, I think it's better if people understand how indexes work at a higher level.
Then you have something, even if you forget how an R-tree works
Think of them as being much like a book index. A book index is useful because it's sorted, so you find something fast. It points to the pages the item is on. Same for a db. The table isn't usually sorted, but the index is and points to the required rows
If you're a book editor and the author adds, edits, or removes a section, you need to update the index
Want to lookup a word by it's suffix? You're gonna need to scan the whole book, or have an index of reversed words
Database indexes work the same way
- nerdponx 9y agoCorollary: if the index is on a low-cardinality field, it won't do much good helping you find what you're looking for.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- saurik 9y agoI don't really understand the thought process. Clearly, to know how they work at the low level you must also understand what they are (the superficial understanding you are describing here). I don't see any harm from also knowing how they work, and as someone who has been using PostgreSQL for something like two decades I am extremely glad I do, so saying it is "better" to only know what they are at a superficial level instead of also knowing how they work at a deep level seems really wrong. Meanwhile, as this article notes in its first sentence, most software engineers in this article's target demographic use database indexes every day and we would be shocked if they didn't already have the superficial level of understanding. Now, I haven't verified this is a good article, nor is it clear to me we needed yet another article to explain this, but you seem to be coming from the idea that this knowledge shouldn't even be imparted?... from the perspective of an "IT educator"? :(
- elchief 9y agoI'm not saying it shouldn't be imparted, but the high level knowledge is better first People seem to get lost in the details. I know devs that understand the various index tree types, but don't understand why something is sargable or why dropping indexes before a bulk copy is faster
- Angostura 9y agoI simply assume that the article is written for people who already know what an index is.
- rusbus 9y agoOP here. That was in fact the case ;-)
- kbwt 9y agoI actually disagree. High-level knowledge without later filling in the gaps leads to cargo-cult software engineering. If people get lost in the details, they are not prepared to fully understand the big picture.
- MaxBarraclough 9y agoI'm not sure that applies to everything, though. I'm sure we agree there's a limit. Joel Spolsky is right when he writes about the 'Law of Leaky Abstractions', but I'm not sure the average CRUD developer needs to know the gory nuts and bolts of his DBMS. Of course they need to know enough to reason effectively about good design, performance, security, etc, and more low-level knowledge is always a good thing. As an extreme example, PHP programmers don't need to understand branch prediction and caches.
- tinymollusk 9y agoYou are very correct for anyone who would consider themselves a programmer. I was thinking in a bigger scope; with so many non-programmers working technical roles (and especially with data/databases), I think this is a marvellous way for e.g. project managers to have a brief mental model of what a db index is.
- raarts 9y agoSo, as an IT educator, how much time do you put in explaining this concept?
- fnl 9y ago> If you're a book editor and the author adds, edits, or removes a section, you need to update the index But all the page references would be wrong, too, after the author updates the text. That would not happen with a DB index and it's data pointers.