Database
Database Indexing Strategies for High-Traffic Applications
August 5, 2026
AIToolXRadar Editorial Team
6 min read
As relational databases grow to millions of rows, unindexed queries quickly degrade application performance from milliseconds to seconds, exhausting database connection pools. Strategic indexing is the single highest-leverage optimization for database performance.
1. B-Tree vs Composite Indexes
-- Creating an optimized composite index for multi-column filtering
CREATE INDEX idx_users_active_created
ON users (is_active, created_at DESC);
-- Analyzing execution cost using EXPLAIN ANALYZE
EXPLAIN ANALYZE
SELECT id, email, created_at
FROM users
WHERE is_active = true
ORDER BY created_at DESC
LIMIT 20;