Primary and secondary indexes
Index: Technical key of a database table.
Primary index: The primary index contains the key fields of the table and a pointer to the non-key fields of the table. The primary index is created automatically when the table is created in the database.
Secondary index: Additional indexes could be created considering the most frequently accessed dimensions of the table.
Structure of an Index
An index can be used to speed up the selection of data records from a table.
An index can be considered to be a copy of a database table reduced to certain fields. The data is stored in sorted form in this copy. This sorting permits fast access to the records of the table (for example using a binary search). Not all of the fields of the table are contained in the index. The index also contains a pointer from the index entry to the corresponding table entry to permit all the field contents to be read.
When creating indexes, please note that:
An index can only be used up to the last specified field in the selection! The fields which are specified in the WHERE clause for a large number of selections should be in the first position.
Only those fields whose values significantly restrict the amount of data are meaningful in an index.
When you change a data record of a table, you must adjust the index sorting. Tables whose contents are frequently changed therefore should not have too many indexes.
Make sure that the indexes on a table are as disjunctive as possible.
(That is they should contain as few fields in common as possible. If two indexes on a table have a large number of common fields, this could make it more difficult for the optimizer to choose the most selective index.)
Accessing tables using Indexes
The database optimizer decides which index on the table should be used by the database to access data records.
You must distinguish between the primary index and secondary indexes of a table. The primary index contains the key fields of the table. The primary index is automatically created in the database when the table is activated. If a large table is frequently accessed such that it is not possible to apply primary index sorting, you should create secondary indexes for the table.
The indexes on a table have a three-character index ID. '0' is reserved for the primary index. Customers can create their own indexes on SAP tables; their IDs must begin with Y or Z.
If the index fields have key function, i.e. they already uniquely identify each record of the table, an index can be called a unique index. This ensures that there are no duplicate index fields in the database.
When you define a secondary index in the ABAP Dictionary, you can specify whether it should be created on the database when it is activated. Some indexes only result in a gain in performance for certain database systems. You can therefore specify a list of database systems when you define an index. The index is then only created on the specified database systems when activated
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