Indexing and Loading Data

Sybase IQ's column-based architecture optimizes your ability to perform selections or calculations on attributes of interest to you. For the best performance, you need to choose the right set of indexes for your data and queries. Your database should have an index on every column that affects performance.

Indexes are used to improve data retrieval performance. Traditional indexes often use a B-tree index strategy to point to the data records. That strategy is valuable only if many unique data values are used to filter down to a very small set of records, as with columns of order numbers or customer names, as you would encounter in a transaction-processing system.

Sybase IQ indexes actually represent and store the data so that the data can be used for accelerating a wide variety of queries. This strategy is designed for the data warehousing environment, in which queries typically examine enormous numbers of records, often with relatively few unique values, and in which aggregate results are commonly required.