A worthwhile article, but I feel the need to trot out my hobbyhorse.

You write about the "best" solution, without defining best. If I read the article correctly, by "best" you...

I'm sorry, but I stopped reading when I read that non-unique indexes "... do not affect the database's behavior at all; they only affect its performance"

If you...

Steve,

It has been a long time since I was in school, but I thought an Exabyte would be 3 orders of magnitude larger than a petabyte.

There is a difference between extremely reluctant and unwilling.

Sometimes the best solution is to do (lots more) work elsewhere so you don't need to deal with a potentially unstable...

Code where it is how to figure out how it works is not (per se) scary. Truly scary code is code where you don't know what it needs to accomplish....

Isn't this just an application-level implementation of hash index?

Good for you for your apology and related actions.

No time for anything more, but keep up the good work.

Thanks.

Jeff Moden (10/29/2013)

I'm just curious. what kind of files are those and what...

Context is everything!

I work on a number of web-based applications and for our applications we rarely see tables with more than 100K rows. On the other hand, we have more...