oracle - How many database indexes is too many?

Question

I'm working on a project with a rather large Oracle database (although my question applies equally well to other databases). We have a web interface which allows users to search on almost any possible combination of fields.

To make these searches go fast, we're adding indexes to the fields and combinations of fields on which we believe users will commonly search. However, since we don't really know how our customers will use this software, it's hard to tell which indexes to create.

Space isn't a concern; we have a 4 terabyte RAID drive of which we are using only a small fraction. However, I'm worried about the possible performance penalties of having too many indexes. Because those indexes need to be updated every time a row is added, deleted, or modified, I imagine it'd be a bad idea to have dozens of indexes on a single table.

So how many indexes is considered too many? 10? 25? 50? Or should I just cover the really, really common and obvious cases and ignore everything else?

Answer 1

It depends on the operations that occur on the table.

If there's lots of SELECTs and very few changes, index all you like.... these will (potentially) speed the SELECT statements up.

If the table is heavily hit by UPDATEs, INSERTs + DELETEs ... these will be very slow with lots of indexes since they all need to be modified each time one of these operations takes place

Having said that, you can clearly add a lot of pointless indexes to a table that won't do anything. Adding B-Tree indexes to a column with 2 distinct values will be pointless since it doesn't add anything in terms of looking the data up. The more unique the values in a column, the more it will benefit from an index.