Follows:The secrets of oracle bitmap indexes

Overview

Oracle's two major index types are

Bitmapindexes

and

B-Tree indexes

. B-Tree indexes arethe regular type that

OLTP systems

make muchuse of, and bitmap indexes are a highlycompressed index type that tends to be usedprimarily for

data warehouses

.Characteristic of Bitmap IndexesFor columns with very few unique values(low cardinality)Columns that have low cardinality aregood candidates (if the cardinality ofa column is <= 0.1 % that the columnis ideal candidate, consider also 0.2%– 1%)Tables that have no or littleinsert/update are good candidates (staticdata in warehouse) Stream of bits: each bit relates to acolumn value in a single row of tablecreate bitmap index person_region onperson (region);Row Region NorthEast West South1 North10 0 02 East01 0 03 West00 1 04 West0

0 1 05 South00 0 16 North10 0 0Advantage of Bitmap IndexesThe advantages of them are that they have ahighly compressed structure,

making them fastto read

and their structure makes it possiblefor the system to combine multiple indexestogether for fast access to the underlyingtable.Compressed indexes, like bitmap indexes,represent a trade-off between CPU usage anddisk space usage. A compressed structure isfaster to read from disk but takes additionalCPU cycles to decompress for access - anuncompressed structure imposes a lower CPUload but requires more bandwidth to read in ashort time.One belief concerning bitmap indexes is thatthey are only suitable for indexing low-cardinality data. This is not necessarilytrue, and bitmap indexes can be used verysuccessfully for indexing columns with manythousands of different values.Disadvantage of Bitmap IndexesThe reason for confining bitmap indexes todata warehouses is that the

overhead on maintaining them is enormous

. A modificationto a bitmap index requires a great deal morework on behalf of the system than amodification to a b-tree index. In addition,the concurrency for modifications on bitmapindexes is dreadful.

Bitmap Indexes and Deadlocks