mihies wrote:
It depends, of course. Yes, if one is upgrading then it should just add/modify new indexes. But sometimes I just need to create from scratch.
Either way, the question remains - is there any support whatsoever for index creation within designer? There is constraint support, indexes are really very similar. Handling indexes manually is at least error prone.
The thing with indexes is that they don't really belong to the model: they belong to the queries run on the database: they're there to make querying faster. This means that the best time to add indices is when you have analyzed which queries are ran so you can make them faster with dedicated indexes.
Just adding indexes on FKs might be tempting but it might be they're counter productive (if that table is more written than read, it hurts performance). It also might be, e.g. in case of compound FKs, you need multiple indexes, one for each pair/single field of the compound FK as it is used in queries.
Nevertheless we do have a workitem to add indexes, as people want to be able to specify them with the model, even though it makes little sense. It won't be in 5.0 though