Developer’s Guide to Database Indexing

Goals of this book

I have three major goals in writing this book. The whole reason I have decided to write Yet Another Book is because I have yet to find a book on this topic that ticks all three boxes for me.

Focus on developing intuition. I’m a strong believer in developing intuition over memorizing facts. The great thing about indexing is that it can be demonstrated beautifully with only a few tables that are sorted in different ways. There will be Try it yourself sections throughout the book that let you take a turn at being the database. This way, you can get a feeling for why an index works or doesn’t work in certain situations.

Aggressively practical. No theory for theory’s sake! We always start out with a real problem we want to solve. Then we learn what we need to learn in order to accomplish this. That doesn’t mean that we will dumb things down or shy away from the details, however. We will go as deep as necessary to really understand the problem. But at no point will you go “wait, how does this help me again?”.

Fun to read. I get it, no one sets out with the goal of writing a boring book (although that could be a cool novelty book). But at least for me personally, a lot of them still miss the mark. I’m not trying to write a reference manual. I want to write something you can read cover to cover and actually enjoy. If you like the style of writing on this page, you’ll probably enjoy the book. If not, well, I guess it’s an acquired taste.