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How to create an index to filter a specific range? AFAIK it's impossible to create directly but I think it's possible simulate this feature.

Example: I wanna create an index for NAME column just to lines with STATUS = 'ACTIVE'

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It would be a good idea to add an example of how the feature might be used, or a reference to the feature in another DMBS's documentation, so people who aren't familiar with the feature but are with mySQL might be able to suggest ways to achieve the same effect efficiently. – David Spillett Jan 3 '11 at 22:41
The equivalent feature in SQL Server would be the filtered index. – Nick Chammas Aug 31 '11 at 16:26

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

If I understand the question correctly, I think what would accomplish what you're trying to do is to create an index on both columns, NAME and STATUS. That would efficiently allow you to query where NAME='SMITH' and STATUS='ACTIVE'

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Ok, but this is not space efficient if you has relatively few lines with status ACTIVE. – bigown Jan 4 '11 at 19:49
No, it is not, but that was not a requirement in the question, and it wasn't stated that the table was heavily weighted to one of the values. For that I would create a materialized view of the STATUS you're looking for, but MySQL doesn't support those. – BlackICE Jan 4 '11 at 19:53
and disk space is cheap... – BlackICE Jan 4 '11 at 19:54
Yes, it's not a direct requirement, so I started the comment with an OK. I looking for some professional alternatives. And professional alternatives always looking for most efficient way to do your tasks. Your answer probably is the most obvious one. No problem with that. But I totally disagree with "disk space is cheap", not because it's expensive, of course is cheap however memory is not so cheap, memory has low limits and index should live primarily on memory to be efficient. Disk access is not so cheap.Your answer certainly is one correct way to achieve the goal but I doubt it is the best. – bigown Jan 4 '11 at 20:13
I would disagree on the memory also, it is pretty cheap these days as well (certainly not as cheap as disk space, but at $10/gig for some of it, I'd say you can splurge a bit :) – BlackICE Jan 5 '11 at 13:40
up vote 2 down vote

You could do this by splitting the data between two tables, using views to union the two tables when all the data is needed, and indexing only one of the tables on that column - but I think this would cause performance problems for queries that need to run over the whole table unless the query planner is more clever than I give it credit for. Essentially you would be manually partitioning the table (and appying the index to only one of the partitions).

Unfortunately the built-in table partitioning feature will not help you in your quest as you can not apply an index to a single partition.

You could maintain an extra column with an index and only have a value in that column when the condition you want the index to be based upon is true, but this is likely to be labour intensive and of limited (or negative) value in terms of query efficiency and space saving.

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I would NOT have two tables just to have better indexing, as the join will still be expensive won't it? – jcolebrand♦ Jan 5 '11 at 5:53
@jcolebrand: it would be more expensive for general queries (over the views doing a union), you would need to specifically select from the partition table to use the index. Built-in partitioning would do this for you efficiently, but only the way Bigown wants (to save space) if it supported partition specific indexes. I said he could do it, not that he would want to! – David Spillett Jan 5 '11 at 10:10
Oh, now I think I more clearly see what you mean. – jcolebrand♦ Jan 5 '11 at 15:14
up vote 2 down vote

You cannot do conditional indexing, but for your example, you can add a multi-column index on (name,status).

Even though it will index all the data in those columns, it will still help you find the names you are looking for with the status "active".

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