MySQL - why not index every field?

问题:

Recently I've learned the wonder of indexes, and performance has improved dramatically. However, with all I've learned, I can't seem to find the answer to this question.

Indexes are great, but why couldn't someone just index all fields to make the table incredibly fast? I'm sure there's a good reason to not do this, but how about three fields in a thirty-field table? 10 in a 30 field? Where should one draw the line, and why?

回答1:

Indexes take up space in memory (RAM); Too many or too large of indexes and the DB is going to have to be swapping them to and from the disk. They also increase insert and delete time (each index must be updated for every piece of data inserted/deleted/updated).

You don't have infinite memory. Making it so all indexes fit in RAM = good.

You don't have infinite time. Indexing only the columns you need indexed minimizes the insert/delete/update performance hit.

回答2:

Keep in mind that every index must be updated any time a row is updated, inserted, or deleted. So the more indexes you have, the slower performance you'll have for write operations.

Also, every index takes up further disk space and memory space (when called), so it could potentially slow read operations as well (for large tables). Check this out

回答3:

You have to balance CRUD needs. Writing to tables becomes slow. As for where to draw the line, that depends on how the data is being acessed (sorting filtering, etc.).

回答4:

Indexing will take up more allocated space both from drive and ram, but also improving the performance a lot. Unfortunately when it reaches memory limit, the system will surrender the drive space and risk the performance. Practically, you shouldn't index any field that you might think doesn't involve in any kind of data traversing algorithm, neither inserting nor searching (WHERE clause). But you should if otherwise. By default you have to index all fields. The fields which you should consider unindexing is if the queries are used only by moderator, unless if they need for speed too

回答5:

It is not a good idea to indexes all the columns in a table. While this will make the table very fast to read from, it also becomes much slower to write to. Writing to a table that has every column indexed would involve putting the new record in that table and then putting each column's information in the its own index table.