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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Covering index

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, covering index means: An index that contains all the column values a particular query needs, potentially avoiding separate table-row reads.

In Turkish: kapsayan indeks

How it is used

Used in query tuning. Whether table access is fully avoided also depends on the database and visibility checks.

Example sentences

  1. The covering index includes both the customer ID and the status returned by the query.

    The query's required values are available together in the index.

  2. Adding a large text column made the covering index too expensive to maintain.

    Faster reads must be weighed against index size and update work.

Common collocations

  • create a covering index
  • covering index scan
  • query tuningThe work of making slow queries faster by studying their execution plans and then adding indexes, rewriting SQL or changing database settings.
  • execution planThe step-by-step strategy the database chooses to run a query, showing which indexes it uses, how tables are joined and how many rows it expects.

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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