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Practice — Database Indexing (6 questions)

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B-Tree vs Hash Index

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Leftmost Prefix Rule

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EXPLAIN ANALYZE Diagnosis

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Covering Index Design

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Write Overhead

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One Index, and Write Throughput Craters Anyway Permalink →

A Postgres user_sessions table has exactly one index: a B-tree on last_active_at, which is updated on essentially every request. Write throughput is far worse than "one extra index write per update" would suggest, and table bloat / autovacuum load is unusually high — for a table with only a single index.

Beyond simple write-count scaling with the number of indexes, what's actually happening?

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