ORACLE Index Management Secrets
In Oracle8 we saw the addition of bitmap indexes, function-based indexes, as well as reverse key indexes and star index structures. We also saw the Oracle SQL optimizer becoming more intelligent about the way indexes are used by SQL statements. In Oracle9i, we have the index skip scan, the and_equal hint to combine individual indexes into a contaminated index, as well as specialized bitmap access methods to improve the speed of data warehouse queries.
