Re: Indexing & data warehousing

Tim Schaefer wrote: > > Billy is right on the money. > > If you use Informix XPS, Informix recommends to avoid using indexes on anything. Interesting statements guys considering that XPS has the widest and strongest compliment of indexing options of any database system on the market. I think that the point is that indexing is not normally needed for Data Warehousing, since response times are rarely an issue, and tends, as Tim points out later in his reply, to slow data loads significantly. HOWEVER, the new XPS pre-join and calculated indexes can be used to replace star-schema type DW designs, and since the data is loading only once rather than loading multiple partial attribute tables and possibly having to massage the data before loading each, can actually load faster so even that rule is not a hard and fast one. Art S. Kagel