There is No Such Thing as an "Index"! or: The next 500 Indexing Papers
Jens Dittrich, Joris Nix, Christian Sch\"on

TL;DR
This paper challenges the traditional concept of manually designing index structures, proposing a genetic algorithm framework (GENE) that automatically generates optimized index structures tailored to specific workloads, potentially surpassing existing methods.
Contribution
It introduces a novel, generic framework for automatic index structure generation using genetic algorithms, shifting away from handcrafted index design.
Findings
Generated indexes can match or outperform traditional designs.
The framework can adapt to various workloads and optimization goals.
Initial results suggest a new paradigm in index structure design.
Abstract
Index structures are a building block of query processing and computer science in general. Since the dawn of computer technology there have been index structures. And since then, a myriad of index structures are being invented and published each and every year. In this paper we argue that the very idea of "inventing an index" is a misleading concept in the first place. It is the analogue of "inventing a physical query plan". This paper is a paradigm shift in which we propose to drop the idea to handcraft index structures (as done for binary search trees over B-trees to any form of learned index) altogether. We present a new automatic index breeding framework coined Genetic Generic Generation of Index Structures (GENE). It is based on the observation that almost all index structures are assembled along three principal dimensions: (1) structural building blocks, e.g., a B-tree is…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Management and Algorithms · Advanced Database Systems and Queries · Data Mining Algorithms and Applications
