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A comment on Let's make the web faster: Tools to discover and improve your site performance. Parent comment

Re:Let's make the web faster: Tools to discover and improve ... by patio11 on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @12:46AM (#1982046)
Backend tuning also involves a lot of black magic, whereas going down the YSlow checklist and knocking things off will improve your perceived user load speed. If you don't gzip, gzip. Bam. Done. It will work. Tuning the database, on the other hand, crikey -- how many chickens does one have to sacrifice to become an expert DBA anyhow?
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Re:Let's make the web faster: Tools to discover and improve ... by JoachimSchipper on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @04:25AM (#1982365)
I think the DB equivalent of turning on gzip is slapping an index on your primary keys [EDIT: should be "on your primary data column"]. Not exactly expert material, and quite useful.
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Re:Let's make the web faster: Tools to discover and improve ... by patio11 on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @05:25AM (#1982440)
I am unaware of a commonly used database where primary keys are not indexed by default. Granted, on a good day I can spell SQL correctly, but it was my impression that primary keys imply an index by definition. Can someone rectify my understanding?
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Re:Let's make the web faster: Tools to discover and improve ... by JoachimSchipper on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @05:35AM (#1982453)
Yeah, you're right. Call it slapping an index on the column holding actual data. My bad.

(The reason that primary keys tend to be auto-indexed is simple: to verify uniqueness, you need to check whether the primary key of the record being inserted is already in any record. Doing this without indices would be painfully slow.)

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