
Why don't databases create their own indexes automatically? - amelius
https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/43772/why-dont-databases-create-their-own-indexes-automatically
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triska
A very justified question, and it seems clear that database systems will
increasingly do this automatically in the future.

For comparison: A very similar issue arises in Prolog, where indexing is
traditionally performed only on the outermost functor and arity of the first
predicate argument to efficiently decide which clauses are applicable if that
argument is sufficiently instantiated at the time the predicate is invoked.

In the recent past, Prolog systems have employed increasingly sophisticated
techniques such as JIT indexing, multi-argument indexing and deep indexing to
automatically select applicable clauses very efficiently in much more general
situations.

So, the actual question seems more like "Why don't databases create their own
indices _yet_?", and if the developments from the Prolog community are any
indication, then maybe more urgent or more interesting tasks had to be solved
first.

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ddtaylor
> The index design that you put in place is something more of an art than a
> science.

Umm, no?

