Ruby On Rails: Database

Indexing Techniques

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Rails Developer at JOsh software,

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 Contents
 DB indexing ?

Why ?

How ?
 How to display indexes in databse table ?
 Is there any overhead when there are lot indexes

What things needs to be taken care of ?
 What are the different tyeps ? (singular/composite)
 How to implement in rails ?
 DB Indexing
 a database index is a data structure that improves
the speed of operations on a database table
 Why to index DB table ?
 If you don't index database tables, its obivous that
app performance is going to be suck ;)
 It does not mean that you are going to add index
on every column of database table otherwise it's
going to be bottleneck in performace :)
 How to add indexes
 CREATE INDEX Syntax

CREATE [UNIQUE|FULLTEXT|SPATIAL] INDEX index_name
 [index_type]
 ON tbl_name (index_col_name,...)
 [index_type]


index_col_name:

col_name [(length)] [ASC | DESC]

 index_type:
 USING {BTREE | HASH}
 CREATE INDEX enables you to add indexes to existing tables.
 A column list of the form (col1,col2,...) creates a multiple-column index.
 Prefixes can be specified for CHAR, VARCHAR, BINARY, and VARBINARY columns.
 CREATE INDEX part_of_name ON customer (name(10));
MySQL showing indexes for
table
 show index from <table-name>

show index from customer_cars;
 +---------------+------------+-----------------------------------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+

 | Table | Non_unique | Key_name | Seq_in_index | Column_name | Collation | Cardinality | Sub_part | Packed | Null | Index_type |
Comment |

 +---------------+------------+-----------------------------------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+

 | customer_cars | 0 | PRIMARY | 1 | id |A | 114905 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | |


| customer_cars | 1 | index_customer_cars_on_customer_id_and_car_id | 1 | customer_id | A | 114905 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE |
|


| customer_cars | 1 | index_customer_cars_on_customer_id_and_car_id | 2 | car_id |A | 114905 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE |
|

 | customer_cars | 1 | index_customer_cars_on_id | 1 | id |A | 114905 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | |


+---------------+------------+-----------------------------------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+


4 rows in set (0.03 sec)
 Bottlenecks
 Performance doesn't comes straight
 Every record getting created or inserted into the
DB table adds extra burden of executing index for
that particular record.
 Also indexes get strored on file-system
 Too many indexes results into poor performance
as choosing indexes adds complexity
 Careful choice of indexes certainly improves
performance.
 What things needs to
concentrated ?
 Observe for slower queries based on time
 Observe for each query based on -
 Frequency
 Foreign keys

Orders
 Conditions
 Types
 Singular made up of one column
 Composite made up of multiple columns
 Rails DB indexing
 In rails, while creating indexes we need to
observe for associations and foreign_keys

Indexing simple associations

class SuccessCall < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :call
 end
 class Call < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_many :success_calls
 end
 add_index :success_calls, :call_id
 Rails DB indexing
 Indexing polymorphic associations (composite)
 class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
 # A comment can be from 'Review', 'Post', 'VideoGallery', 'PhotoGallery', 'Product'
 # contains columns resource_id, resource_type
 belongs_to :resource, :polymorphic => true
 end
 class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_many :comments, :as => resource
 end
 add_index :comments, [:resource_id, :resource_type]
 Rails DB indexing
 Indexing foreign_keys (singular)
 class Following < ActiveRecord::Base
 belongs_to :follower, :class_name => 'User', :foreign_key => :follower_id
 belongs_to :followed, :class_name => 'User', :foreign_key => :followed_id
 end
 class User < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_many :following_as_follower, :foreign_key => :follower_id, :class_name =>
'Following'
 has_many :following_as_followed, :foreign_key => :followed_id, :class_name =>
'Following'

End

(continue...)
 Rails DB indexing
 Indexing foreign_keys (singular)
 add_index :following, :follower_id
 add_index :following, :followed_id
 Rails DB indexing
 Indexing finders
 find_by_<attribute>
 add_index :<table_name>, attribute
 find_by_<attribute1>_and_<attribute2>
 add_index :<table_name>, [attribute1, attribute2]
 conditions => ['<attr1> = ? and <attr2> = ? or
<attr3> = ?', ?, ?,?]
 add_index :<table_name>, [attr, attr2, attr3]
 Migrating Indexes
 Create Index
 add_index(table_name, column_names, options)
 Adds a new index with the name of the column.
Other options include :name and :unique (e.g. {
:name => "users_name_index", :unique => true }).
 Remove Index
 remove_index(table_name, index_name)
 Removes the index specified by index_name.

NOTE: sometimes index names becomes too large so that it's not
supported by database in such cases make use of name option
 Got Lasy ?
There is plugin called rails_indexes
Description
A rake task to track down missing database indexes that does not
assume that all foreign keys end with the convention of _id
Installation
script/plugin install git://github.com/eladmeidar/rails_indexes.git
Usage
rake db:index_migration
rake db:find_query_indexes
Questions ??

???
 References
 http://api.rubyonrails.org/
 http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-index.html

http://github.com/eladmeidar/rails_indexes