[TYPO3-dev] Typo3 Database design question (optimization / indices)

[Dimitri Tarassenko]

Marc,

On 3/23/06, Marc Wöhlken <woehlken at quadracom.de> wrote:

> > You probably meant "indexes", not fields. Anyways, very good question.
> > Probably because for ages the biggest performance issue was not within
> > MySQL but with PHP, and the majority of performance-improving efforts
> > went into caching.
> That is the explanation that came to my mind to: "nobody cared".

To put it mildly, "nobody cared enough", but in a nutshell, yes ;)

> > One other observation - I know very little of MySQL performance
> > tuning, but both on MS SQL and Postgres it is sometimes better to have
> > "compound" indices including 2 or more fields. For example, a query
> How to finetune the database is certainly an interesting subject for itself.
> my first concern is / was to ensure these optimizations do not collide
> with some substantial decision by the typo3 core team which I might have
> missed...

The only possible negative impact of a new [non-unique,
non-constraining] index is decrease in INSERT/UPDATE queries
performance - any index is a trade off of slower writes for faster
reads. In case of TYPO3 I think this is not an issue at all. I don't
see how there could possibly be any collisions. I am not in the core
team, but I doubt they'll tell you anything different.

--
Dimitri Tarassenko