What is Database Index? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table. An index creates a separate lookup structure — similar to a book's index — that allows the database engine to find rows matching a query condition without scanning the entire table. The tradeoff: indexes speed up reads but slow down writes (because the index must be updated on every insert/update/delete).
Database-index in the UK
Database indexing has direct performance and UK compliance implications. Performance: unindexed queries on large tables can cause timeouts and poor user experience — a query taking 30 seconds on a 10-million-row table might take 5ms with the correct index. FCA operational resilience: poor database performance under load can cause services to fail to meet impact tolerances — index strategy is part of performance architecture. UK GDPR right to erasure: deleting a user's data requires finding all their records across multiple tables — indexes on user ID foreign keys make cascading deletes efficient rather than full table scans.
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