Data indexing

As data grows, the access to data starts getting slower. Retrieving exactly the proper data from a big table full of information requires performing more internal operations to locate it.

While we will describe data indexing in relation to relational databases, most of the fundamentals are applicable to other databases.

This process can be greatly speeded up by organizing the data smartly in a way that is easy to search. This leads to creating indexes that allow you to locate data very quickly by searching through them. The basics of an index is to create an external sorted data structure that points to one or more fields of each of the records of the database. This index structure is always kept sorted as data in the table changes.

For example, a short table may contain this information

id

Name

...