CHAPTER 1

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Oracle Indexes

An index is an optionally created database object used primarily to increase query performance. The purpose of a database index is similar to an index in the back of a book. A book index associates a topic with a page number. When you're locating information in a book, it's usually much faster to examine the index first, find the topic of interest, and identify associated page numbers. With this information, you can navigate directly to specific page numbers in the book. If the topic only appears on a few pages within the book, then the number of pages to read is minimal. In this manner, the usefulness of the index decreases ...

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