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In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a designated attribute that can reliably identify and distinguish between each individual record in a table.The database creator can choose an existing unique attribute or combination of attributes from the table (a natural key) to act as its primary key, or create a new attribute containing a unique ID that exists solely for this purpose ...
A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of additional writes and storage space to maintain the index data structure. Indexes are used to quickly locate data without having to search every row in a database table every time said table is accessed.
Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization ... In our example, the primary key is a composite key ... let you specify a "columnstore index" for a particular ...
CREATE creates an object (a table, for example) in the database, e.g.: CREATE TABLE example ( column1 INTEGER , column2 VARCHAR ( 50 ), column3 DATE NOT NULL , PRIMARY KEY ( column1 , column2 ) ); ALTER modifies the structure of an existing object in various ways, for example, adding a column to an existing table or a constraint, e.g.:
When the data model is instantiated into a physical database, it is the key that the system uses the most when accessing the table, or joining the tables together when selecting data. Alternate A non-primary key that can be used to identify only one row in a table. Alternate keys may be used like a primary key in a single-table select. Foreign ...
The use of efficient indexes on both primary and foreign keys can dramatically improve query performance. This is because B-tree indexes result in query times proportional to log(n) where n is the number of rows in a table and hash indexes result in constant time queries (no size dependency as long as the relevant part of the index fits into ...
Therefore, a relation can have multiple candidate keys, each with a different number of attributes. [2] Specific candidate keys are sometimes called primary keys, secondary keys or alternate keys. The columns in a candidate key are called prime attributes, [3] and a column that does not occur in any candidate key is called a non-prime attribute.
Usually one candidate key is chosen to be called the primary key and used in preference over the other candidate keys, which are then called alternate keys. A candidate key is a unique identifier enforcing that no tuple will be duplicated; this would make the relation into something else, namely a bag, by violating the basic definition of a set ...