Database Performance: Indexing Strategies That Work

The Index Sweet Spot

Indexes speed up reads but slow down writes. The art is finding the right balance for your workload. Most applications are read-heavy, so indexing is almost always worth it — but wrong indexes can be worse than none.

Composite Indexes

A composite index on (status, created_at) serves queries that filter by status and sort by date. But the column order matters: put the most selective column first.

 INDEX idx_posts_status_date
   blog_posts (published, published_at );


   blog_posts
   published     published_at ;


   blog_posts  published  ;