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It's not that the actual command you enter to create an index is hard. It's just that when you have a table with millions or billions of rows, you have to figure out how to create the index without stopping the world for hours.

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With postgresql, create index does not block read, only write. You can also use the CONCURRENTLY parameter and writes/updates won't be blocked, but the index creation takes longer (the db has to wait until no transaction potentially involving the index has stopped).

Not sure what other strategies exist to reliably build an index.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-createinde...

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