Show HN: I Wrote a Book About Database Indexes for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I Wrote a Book About Database Indexes for Developers

sqlfordevs.com

31 pointstpetry6 comments

Hey everyone, Tobias here, the author. I am a developer fascinated by databases for over a decade and I have consumed (and still consume) everything I can find about them - including every article shared here.

When helping other developers, I see that they all struggle with creating correct database indexes for slow queries. But I could never recommend articles or books to learn it as they only discuss very simple examples or focus on super complicated stuff that is only needed by a tiny fraction of developers.

So, I wrote this book to have something I can recommend to everyone. And I did it in a completely different way:

- Focus on only practical stuff a developer needs

- Explanation of the basic principles of how indexes are used

- Examples of how all SQL operations use indexes and how they behave when combined (that's always missed in literature)

- Dozens of visualizations for an easier understanding and to replace boring walls of text

You can download preview chapters on the landing page to experience the difference. If you buy and don't like it, there's a full money-back guarantee with no questions asked.

Let me know if you have any questions, and any feedback is much appreciated!

Thanks, Tobias, bought a copy, maybe I learn something that I can apply to improve the performance of my analytics app schema or indexes [0].

Based on your experience, if the proper indexes are in place, would a ~10m rows MySQL database have similar read performance to a larger, ~100m rows database, if we would aggregate over the most recent ~1m rows in both cases?

I am struggling a bit to maintain sub-second queries for databases over ~20m rows, even when the proper indexes seem to be in place.

[0]: https://docs.uxwizz.com/guides/database-querying

This looks fantastic and I'd love to give it a go, but £64.55 for the epub only feels a little expensive to me. The Pragmatic Bookshelf books usually come it at around £20 for example. So I'm afraid I have to give it a miss at that price. I thought you might appreciate this feedback as I was getting out my card by the end of the page and the left when I saw the price.

Bought the book the other day and just made a start on reading it.

I have a lot of DB experience and am a massive proponent of appropriate indexing, but I know for a fact that Tobias has far more, deeper knowledge than me on this subject and am looking forward to learning some new tricks as well as getting a deeper understanding of database indexing internals

Thanks Tobias! Keep up the awesome work

I am still reading it but so far this book has been very helpful. A lot of great insights and explanations

Good news

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