Summary
The bitmap and bitmap join indexes are most commonly used in the data warehouse environment. The simple bitmap index can also be used outside of the data warehouse but the bitmap join index is really specifically designed to be used within the star schema, which is a data model built for the data warehouse environment.
They key advantages with bitmap indexes are that they can be created very quickly and generally take up much less space than a B-tree counterpart index. This fact makes rebuild operations much more attractive, as they can be rebuilt very quickly. Query performance is aided by bitmap indexes, as they can be scanned quickly because they are smaller.
The biggest drawback of bitmap indexes is that DML operations can be much ...
Get Expert Indexing in Oracle Database 11g: Maximum Performance for Your Database now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
