Chapter 3 Building Physical Diagrams


Index properties

You can access index properties from a table property sheet:

Property Description
Name The name of the item which should be clear and meaningful, and should convey the item's purpose to non-technical users
Code The technical name of the item used for generating code or scripts, which may be abbreviated, and should not generally include spaces
Comment Descriptive label for the index
Stereotype Sub-classification used to extend the semantics of an object without changing its structure; it can be predefined or user-defined
Owner Name of index owner. You choose an owner from a list of users, the index and table owners can be identical or different. An index can only have one owner at a time. This is normally the index creator
Table Indicate table to index
Type Proprietary index type (for Sybase IQ, and Oracle only)
Unique Indicate whether an index is a unique index
Cluster Indicate whether an index is a clustered index

An index also includes the following properties:

Property Description
Columns Columns associated with index. This includes column definition indicating the primary key, foreign key, or alternate key to index. The index is associated with the columns of the selected key
Options Physical options for the index. These are DBMS specific
Rules Business rules attached to the index

Index types

The following index types exist:

Type Description
Bitmap (Oracle) In a bitmap index, a bitmap for each key value is used instead of a list of row Ids
HG (Sybase IQ) HighGroup indexes are used for GROUP BY, COUNT(DISTINCT) and SELECT DISTINCT statements when data has more than 1000 unique values
HNG (Sybase IQ) HighNonGroup indexes make equality comparisons, SUM and AVG calculations very fast when data has more than 1000 unique values. Nonequality comparisons can also be done
LF (Sybase IQ) LowFast indexes are used for columns that have a very low number of unique values. This index also facilitates join index processing. It is one of the two indexes allowed for columns used in join relationships
CMP (Sybase IQ) Compare indexes are used for columns that store the binary comparison (<, >, or =) of any two distinct columns with identical data types, precision, and scale
WD (Sybase IQ) Is used to index keywords by treating the contents of a CHAR or VARCHAR column as a delimited list

Note   One clustered index per table
A table cannot have more than one clustered index.

Index owner

Some DBMS allow you to define an index owner, either identical or different from the table owner. If the DBMS of the current model does not support index owners, the table owner will be automatically assigned to the index after switching to a DBMS that supports index owners.

 


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