Oracle Vs MS-SQL: INDEX

In continuation with the topic 'Oracle Vs MS-SQL : Views' , I would like to say about indexes before taking you to the materialized views, because materilazied views use the Index. Index is not a new concept or strictly database concept. It is similar as book index which helps to find out a paricular topic instead of searching all the pages to find out the topic. Index in database is used to improve the performance of the query. Index concept is there in both oralce as well as MS-SQL. Indexes are most useful on larger tables, on columns that are likely to appear in 'where ' clauses. We can create index on multiple columns and it is better to create less number of index with multiple column instead of creating index on each columns. If we create more index on the table then the DML operation will take longer time to execute. There are two types of Index, first one is Btree and the other is Bitmap, but MS-SQL does not support Bitmap seraching. Btree A B-tree consist