Development & Programming
Why Your App Gets Slow with Growing Datasets
A backend application runs smoothly locally during development. After all, the test database contains only fifteen rows per table. However, as soon as the application goes to production and processes millions of records after a year, the system crashes due to slow load times and timeouts. The number one cause of this type of production failure is substandard database indexing and poorly written SQL queries. Developers often treat the database as a magic black box: you submit a query and hope for the best.
How Does a Database Index Work? (B-Trees)
If a database has no index to a table with a million rows and you search for SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = 'test@it-idiots.nl'', then the database must perform a ‘Sequential Scan’. An Index (by default structured as a **B-Tree** or Balanced Tree) solves this by storing sorted keys in a tree structure, allowing the database to look up any record within logarithmic time complexity.
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