I've be told and read it everywhere (but no one dared to explain why) that when composing an index on multiple columns I should put the most selective column first, for performance reasons.
Why is that?
Is it a myth?
I should put the most selective column first
According to Tom, column selectivity has no performance impact for queries that use all the columns in the index (it does affect Oracle's ability to compress the index).
it is not the first thing, it is not the most important thing. sure, it is something to consider but it is relatively far down there in the grand scheme of things.
In certain strange, very peculiar and abnormal cases (like the above with really utterly skewed data), the selectivity could easily matter HOWEVER, they are
a) pretty rare
b) truly dependent on the values used at runtime, as all skewed queries are
so in general, look at the questions you have, try to minimize the indexes you need based on that.
The number of distinct values in a column in a concatenated index is not relevant when considering
the position in the index.
However, these considerations should come second when deciding on index column order. More importantly is to ensure that the index can be useful to many queries, so the column order has to reflect the use of those columns (or the lack thereof) in the where clauses of your queries (for the reason illustrated by AndreKR).
HOW YOU USE the index -- that is what is relevant when deciding.
All other things being equal, I would still put the most selective column first. It just feels right...
Update: Another quote from Tom (thanks to milan for finding it).
In Oracle 5 (yes, version 5!), there was an argument for placing the most selective columns first
in an index.
Since then, it is not true that putting the most discriminating entries first in the index
will make the index smaller or more efficient. It seems like it will, but it will not.
With index
key compression, there is a compelling argument to go the other way since it can make the index
smaller. However, it should be driven by how you use the index, as previously stated.
You can omit columns from right to left when using an index, i.e. when you have an index on col_a, col_b you can use it in WHERE col_a = x but you can not use it in WHERE col_b = x.
Imagine to have a telephone book that is sorted by the first names and then by the last names.
At least in Europe and US first names have a much lower selectivity than last names, so looking up the first name wouldn't narrow the result set much, so there would still be many pages to check for the correct last name.
The ordering of the columns in the index should be determined by your queries and not be any selectivity considerations. If you have an index on (a,b,c), and most of your single column queries are against column c, followed by a, then put them in the order of c,a,b in the index definition for the best efficiency. Oracle prefers to use the leading edge of the index for the query, but can use other columns in the index in a less efficient access path known as skip-scan.
The more selective is your index, the fastest is the research.
Simply imagine a phonebook: you can find someone mostly fast by lastname. But if you have a lot of people with the same lastname, you will last more time on looking for the person by looking at the firstname everytime.
So you have to give the most selective columns firstly to avoid as much as possible this problem.
Additionally, you should then make sure that your queries are using correctly these "selectivity criterias".
Related
I have formulated a solution to a problem where I am storing parameters in a set of tables, and I want to be able to look up the parameters based on multiple criteria.
For example, if criteria 1 and criteria 2 can each be either A or B, then I'd have four potential parameters - one for each combination A&A, A&B, B&A and B&B. For these sort of criteria I could concatenate the fields or something similar and create a unique key to look up each value quickly.
Unfortunately not all of my criteria are like this. Some of the criteria are numerical and I only care about whether or not a result sits above or below a boundary. That also wouldn't be a problem on its own - I could maybe use a binary search or something relatively quick to find the nearest key above or below my value.
My problem is I need to include a number of each in the same table. In other words, I could have three criteria - two with A/B entries, and one with less-than-x/greater-than-x type entries, where x is in no way fixed. So in this example I would have a table with 8 entries. I can't just do a binary search for the boundary because the closest boundary won't necessarily be applicable due to the other criteria. For example, if the first two criteria are A&B, then the closest boundary might be 100, but if the if first two criteria are A&A, the closest boundary might be 50. If I want to look up A, A, 101, then I want it to recognise that 50 is the closest boundary that applies - not 100.
I have a procedure to do the lookup but it gets very slow as the tables get bigger - it basically goes through each criteria, checks if a match is still possible, and if so it looks at more criteria - if not, it moves on to check the next entry in the table. So in other words, my procedure requires cycling through the table entries one by one and checking for a match. I have tried to optimise that by ensuring the tables that are input to the procedure are as small as possible and by making sure it looks at the criteria that are least likely to match first (so that it checks each entry as quickly as possible) but it is still very slow.
The biggest tables are maybe 200 rows with about 10 criteria to check, but many are much smaller (maybe 10x5). The issue is that I need to call the procedure many times during my application, so algorithms with some initial overhead don't necessarily make things better. I do have some scope to change the format of the tables before runtime but I would like to keep away from that as much as possible (while recognising it may be the only way forward).
I've done quite a bit of research but I haven't had any luck. Does anyone know of any algorithms that have been designed to tackle this kind of problem? I was really hoping that there would be some clever hash function or something that means I won't have to cycle through the tables, but from my limited knowledge something like that would struggle here. I feel confident that I understand the problem well enough to gradually optimise the solution I have at the moment, but I want to be sure I've not missed a much better solution.
Apologies for the very long and abstract description of the problem - hopefully it's clear what I'm trying to do. I'll amend my question if it's unclear.
Thanks for any help.
this is basically what a query optimizer does in SQL land. There are fast, free, in memory databases for exactly this purpose. Checkout sqlite https://www.sqlite.org/inmemorydb.html.
It sounds like you are doing what is called a 'full table scan' for each query, which is like the last resort for a query optimizer.
As I've understood, you want to select entries by criteria like
A& not B & x1 >= lower_x1 & x1 < upper_x1 & x2 >= lower_x2 & x2 < lower_x2 & ...
The easiest way is to have them sorted by all possible xi, where i=1,2.. in separate sets, and have separated 'words' for various combination of A,B,..
The search will works as follows:
Select a proper world by Boolean criteria combination
For each i, find the population of lower_xi..upper_xi range in corresponding set (this operation is O(log(N))
Select i where the population is the lowest
While iterating instances through lower_xi..upper_xi range, filter the results by checking other upper/lower bound criteria (for all xj where j!=i)
Note that this s a general solution. Of course if you know some relation between your bound(s), you may use a list sorted by respective combination(s) of item values.
Let's say I have a table called PEOPLE having three columns, ID, LastName, and FirstName. None of these columns are indexed.
LastName is more unique, and FirstName is less unique.
If I do two searches:
select * from PEOPLE where FirstName="F" and LastName="L"
select * from PEOPLE where LastName="L" and FirstName="F"
My belief is the second one is faster because the more unique criterion (LastName) comes first in the where clause, and records will get eliminated more efficiently. I don't think the optimizer is smart enough to optimize the first SQL query.
Is my understanding correct?
No, that order doesn't matter (or at least: shouldn't matter).
Any decent query optimizer will look at all the parts of the WHERE clause and figure out the most efficient way to satisfy that query.
I know the SQL Server query optimizer will pick a suitable index - no matter which order you have your two conditions in. I assume other RDBMS will have similar strategies.
What does matter is whether or not you have a suitable index for this!
In the case of SQL Server, it will likely use an index if you have:
an index on (LastName, FirstName)
an index on (FirstName, LastName)
an index on just (LastName), or just (FirstName) (or both)
On the other hand - again for SQL Server - if you use SELECT * to grab all columns from a table, and the table is rather small, then there's a good chance the query optimizer will just do a table (or clustered index) scan instead of using an index (because the lookup into the full data page to get all other columns just gets too expensive very quickly).
The order of WHERE clauses should not make a difference in a database that conforms to the SQL standard. The order of evaluation is not guaranteed in most databases.
Do not think that SQL cares about the order. The following generates an error in SQL Server:
select *
from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
where ISNUMERIC(table_name) = 1 and CAST(table_name as int) <> 0
If the first part of this clause were executed first, then only numeric table names would be cast as integers. However, it fails, providing a clear example that SQL Server (as with other databases) does not care about the order of clauses in the WHERE statement.
ANSI SQL Draft 2003 5WD-01-Framework-2003-09.pdf
6.3.3.3 Rule evaluation order
...
Where the precedence is not determined by the Formats or by parentheses, effective evaluation of expressions is generally performed from left to right. However, it is implementation-dependent whether expressions are actually evaluated left to right, particularly when operands or operators might cause conditions to be raised or if the results of the expressions can be determined without completely evaluating all parts of the expression.
copied from here
No, all the RDBMs first start by analysing the query and optimize it by reordering your where clause.
Depending on which RDBM you are you using can display what is the result of the analyse (search for explain plan in oracle for instance)
M.
It's true as far as it goes, assuming the names aren't indexed.
Different data would make it wrong though. In order to find out which way to do it, which could differ every time, the DBMS would have to run a distinct count query for each column and compare the numbers, that would cost more than just shrugging and getting on with it.
Original OP statement
My belief is the second one is faster because the more unique criterion (LastName) comes first in >the where clause, and records will get eliminated more efficiently. I don't think the optimizer is >smart enough to optimize the first sql.
I guess you are confusing this with selecting the order of columns while creating the indexes where you have to put the more selective columns first than second most selective and so on.
BTW, for the above two query SQL server optimizer will not do any optimization but will use Trivila plan as long as the total cost of the plan is less than parallelism threshold cost.
For Oracle and being Relative to application tuning, when may it make sense to not have an index on a table and why?
There is a cost associated to having an index:
it takes up disk space
it slows down updates (index needs to be updated as well)
it makes query planning more complex (slightly slower, but more importantly increased potential for bad decisions)
These costs are supposed to be offset by the benefit of more efficient query processing (faster, fewer I/O).
If the index is not used enough to justify the cost, then having the index will be negative.
In particular, if your data distribution is low (think flags like 'Y' and 'N'), indexes won't help much. Think of it this way: if the number of distinct values in an index is low, the optimizer will probably choose not to use the index. An interesting aside is that if the column in the index is null, it might be much faster if your query criteria include actual values as nulls aren't indexed, which means that only the actual values (non null) are in that particular index,thereby not evaluating most of the rows in the table. In the "is null" case, it will never use an index - if you have a query with a "where" clause like "where mytable.mycolumn is null", abandon all indexes ye who enter here.
If a table has very little data (small number of rows) then it doesn't serve you to use an index. An index makes it quick to search on a specific attribute and if the application you are working with doesn't need a fast lookup then using an index does very little for you.
I´m currently working on optimzing my database schema in regards of index structures. As I´d like to increase my DDL performance I´m searching for potential drop candidates on my Oracle 12c system. Here´s the scenario in which I don´t know what the consequences for the query performance might be if I drop the index.
Given two indexes on the same table:
- non-unique, single column index IX_A (indexes column A)
- unique, combined index UQ_AB (indexes column A, then B)
Using index monitoring I found that the query optimizer didn´t choose UQ_AB, but only IX_A (probably because it´s smaller and thus faster to read). As UQ_AB contains column A and additionally column B I´d like to drop IX_A. Though I´m not sure if I get any performance penalties if I do so. Does the higher selectivity of the combined unique index have any influence on the execution plans?
It could do, though it's quite likely to be minor (usually). Of course it depends on various things, for example how large the values in column B are.
You can look at various columns in USER_INDEXES to compare the two indexes, such as:
BLEVEL: tells you the "height" of the index tree (well, height is BLEVEL+1)
LEAF_BLOCKS: how many data blocks are occupied by the index values
DISTINCT_KEYS: how "selective" the index is
(You need to have analyzed the table first for these to be accurate). That will give you an idea of how much work Oracle needs to do to find a row using the index.
Of course the only way to really be sure is to benchmark and compare timings or even trace output.
I have two databases that are differently formatted. Each database contains person data such as name, date of birth and address. They are both fairly large, one is ~50,000 entries the other ~1.5 million.
My problem is to compare the entries and find possible matches. Ideally generating some sort of percentage representing how close the data matches. I have considered solutions involving generating multiple indexes or searching based on Levenshtein distance but these both seem sub-optimal. Indexes could easily miss close matches and Levenshtein distance seems too expensive for this amount of data.
Let's try to put a few ideas together. The general situation is too broad, and these will be just guidelines/tips/whatever.
Usually what you'll want is not a true/false match relationship, but a scoring for each candidate match. That is because you never can't be completely sure if candidate is really a match.
The score is a relation one to many. You should be prepared to rank each record of your small DB against several records of the master DB.
Each kind of match should have assigned a weight and a score, to be added up for the general score of that pair.
You should try to compare fragments as small as possible in order to detect partial matches. Instead of comparing [address], try to compare [city] [state] [street] [number] [apt].
Some fields require special treatment, but this issue is too broad for this answer. Just a few tips. Middle initial in names and prefixes could add some score, but should be kept at a minimum (as they are many times skipped). Phone numbers may have variable prefixes and suffixes, so sometimes a substring matching is needed. Depending on the data quality, names and surnames must be converted to soundex or similar. Streets names are usually normalized, but they may lack prefixes or suffixes.
Be prepared for long runtimes if you need a high quality output.
A porcentual threshold is usually set, so that if after processing a partially a pair, and obtaining a score of less than x out of a max of y, the pair is discarded.
If you KNOW that some field MUST match in order to consider a pair as a candidate, that usually speeds the whole thing a lot.
The data structures for comparing are critical, but I don't feel my particular experience will serve well you, as I always did this kind of thing in a mainframe: very high speed disks, a lot of memory, and massive parallelisms. I could think what is relevant for the general situation, if you feel some help about it may be useful.
HTH!
PS: Almost a joke: In a big project I managed quite a few years ago we had the mother maiden surname in both databases, and we assigned a heavy score to the fact that = both surnames matched (the individual's and his mother's). Morale: All Smith->Smith are the same person :)
You could try using Full text search feature maybe, if your DBMS supports it? Full text search builds its indices, and can find similar word.
Would that work for you?