Re: Indexing & data warehousing

On 22 Dec 98, at 11:50, Art S. Kagel wrote: > 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. Uh, that's "guy", not "guys". I've never worked with XPS, so I don't know what XPS offers. :-) > 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. Interesting. Maybe I should try and load up XPS on my Linux box and play with it... [One for our regular viewers! :-] -- Ciao, Billy Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints...