I agree with Cade Roux.
This article should get you on the right track:
One thing to note, clustered indexes should have a unique key (an identity column I would recommend) as the first column.
Basically it helps your data insert at the end of the index and not cause lots of disk IO and Page splits.
Secondly, if you are creating other indexes on your data and they are constructed cleverly they will be reused.
e.g. imagine you search a table on three columns
state, county, zip.
- you sometimes search by state only.
- you sometimes search by state and county.
- you frequently search by state, county, zip.
Then an index with state, county, zip. will be used in all three of these searches.
If you search by zip alone quite a lot then the above index will not be used (by SQL Server anyway) as zip is the third part of that index and the query optimiser will not see that index as helpful.
You could then create an index on Zip alone that would be used in this instance.
By the way We can take advantage of the fact that with Multi-Column indexing the first index column is always usable for searching and when you search only by 'state' it is efficient but yet not as efficient as Single-Column index on 'state'
I guess the answer you are looking for is that it depends on your where clauses of your frequently used queries and also your group by's.
The article will help a lot. :-)
SELECT owner, table_name
FROM dba_tables
This is assuming that you have access to the DBA_TABLES data dictionary view. If you do not have those privileges but need them, you can request that the DBA explicitly grants you privileges on that table, or, that the DBA grants you the SELECT ANY DICTIONARY privilege or the SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE role (either of which would allow you to query any data dictionary table). Of course, you may want to exclude certain schemas like SYS and SYSTEM which have large numbers of Oracle tables that you probably don't care about.
Alternatively, if you do not have access to DBA_TABLES, you can see all the tables that your account has access to through the ALL_TABLES view:
SELECT owner, table_name
FROM all_tables
Although, that may be a subset of the tables available in the database (ALL_TABLES shows you the information for all the tables that your user has been granted access to).
If you are only concerned with the tables that you own, not those that you have access to, you could use USER_TABLES:
SELECT table_name
FROM user_tables
Since USER_TABLES only has information about the tables that you own, it does not have an OWNER column – the owner, by definition, is you.
Oracle also has a number of legacy data dictionary views-- TAB, DICT, TABS, and CAT for example-- that could be used. In general, I would not suggest using these legacy views unless you absolutely need to backport your scripts to Oracle 6. Oracle has not changed these views in a long time so they often have problems with newer types of objects. For example, the TAB and CAT views both show information about tables that are in the user's recycle bin while the [DBA|ALL|USER]_TABLES views all filter those out. CAT also shows information about materialized view logs with a TABLE_TYPE of "TABLE" which is unlikely to be what you really want. DICT combines tables and synonyms and doesn't tell you who owns the object.
Best Solution
The Oracle documentation has an excellent set of considerations for indexing choices: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28274/data_acc.htm#PFGRF004
Update for 19c: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/tgdba/designing-and-developing-for-performance.html#GUID-99A7FD1B-CEFD-4E91-9486-2CBBFC2B7A1D
Quoting:
Consider indexing keys that are used frequently in WHERE clauses.
Consider indexing keys that are used frequently to join tables in SQL statements. For more information on optimizing joins, see the section "Using Hash Clusters for Performance".
Choose index keys that have high selectivity. The selectivity of an index is the percentage of rows in a table having the same value for the indexed key. An index's selectivity is optimal if few rows have the same value. Note: Oracle automatically creates indexes, or uses existing indexes, on the keys and expressions of unique and primary keys that you define with integrity constraints. Indexing low selectivity columns can be helpful if the data distribution is skewed so that one or two values occur much less often than other values.
Do not use standard B-tree indexes on keys or expressions with few distinct values. Such keys or expressions usually have poor selectivity and therefore do not optimize performance unless the frequently selected key values appear less frequently than the other key values. You can use bitmap indexes effectively in such cases, unless the index is modified frequently, as in a high concurrency OLTP application.
Do not index columns that are modified frequently. UPDATE statements that modify indexed columns and INSERT and DELETE statements that modify indexed tables take longer than if there were no index. Such SQL statements must modify data in indexes as well as data in tables. They also generate additional undo and redo.
Do not index keys that appear only in WHERE clauses with functions or operators. A WHERE clause that uses a function, other than MIN or MAX, or an operator with an indexed key does not make available the access path that uses the index except with function-based indexes.
Consider indexing foreign keys of referential integrity constraints in cases in which a large number of concurrent INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements access the parent and child tables. Such an index allows UPDATEs and DELETEs on the parent table without share locking the child table.
When choosing to index a key, consider whether the performance gain for queries is worth the performance loss for INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs and the use of the space required to store the index. You might want to experiment by comparing the processing times of the SQL statements with and without indexes. You can measure processing time with the SQL trace facility.