I think most devs understand indexing at this point, if only because ORMs generally include it as a keyword. What they don't understand is why an index might fa

I think most devs understand indexing at this point, if only because ORMs generally include it as a keyword. What they don't understand is why an index might fail to be used, which to be fair, is a massive subject on its own. MySQL is one thing, since it pretty much only has B+tree (plus FTS). It's also case-insensitive by default, so foot guns like "smith" != "Smith" go away. But of course, MySQL isn't cool anymore, and dear lord does Postgres have some gotchas. Wrong collation? No index. Wrong case? No index. You didn't explicitly cast something and the result technically works, but isn't exactly correct? No index. Used a partial index with `WHERE foo` and then queried with `WHERE foo IS NOT FALSE`? No index. Table stats are wrong because you haven't adjusted autovacuum/autoanalyze daemons? Believe or not, no index. As for normalization, yeah, that's right out. Unless you had a unicorn design your schema, 0% chance dev teams know or care about it until it bites them, and then it's a massive undertaking to fix it. Source: DBRE who is both very happy that my skillset is absurdly in demand, and also constantly screaming into the void about everything.