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SQLite Expert Extension
This folder contains code for a simple system to propose useful indexes given a database and a set of SQL queries. It works as follows:
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The user database schema is copied to a temporary database.
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All SQL queries are prepared against the temporary database. Information regarding the WHERE and ORDER BY clauses, and other query features that affect index selection are recorded.
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The information gathered in step 2 is used to create candidate indexes - indexes that the planner might have made use of in the previous step, had they been available.
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A subset of the data in the user database is used to generate statistics for all existing indexes and the candidate indexes generated in step 3 above.
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The SQL queries are prepared a second time. If the planner uses any of the indexes created in step 3, they are recommended to the user.
C API
The SQLite expert C API is defined in sqlite3expert.h. Most uses will proceed as follows:
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An sqlite3expert object is created by calling sqlite3_expert_new(). A database handle opened by the user is passed as an argument.
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The sqlite3expert object is configured with one or more SQL statements by making one or more calls to sqlite3_expert_sql(). Each call may specify a single SQL statement, or multiple statements separated by semi-colons.
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Optionally, the sqlite3_expert_config() API may be used to configure the size of the data subset used to generate index statistics. Using a smaller subset of the data can speed up the analysis.
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sqlite3_expert_analyze() is called to run the analysis.
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One or more calls are made to sqlite3_expert_report() to extract components of the results of the analysis.
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sqlite3_expert_destroy() is called to free all resources.
Refer to comments in sqlite3expert.h for further details.
sqlite3_expert application
The file "expert.c" contains the code for a command line application that uses the API described above. It can be compiled with (for example):
gcc -O2 sqlite3.c expert.c sqlite3expert.c -o sqlite3_expert
Assuming the database is named "test.db", it can then be run to analyze a single query:
./sqlite3_expert -sql <sql-query> test.db
Or an entire text file worth of queries with:
./sqlite3_expert -file <text-file> test.db
By default, sqlite3_expert generates index statistics using all the data in the user database. For a large database, this may be prohibitively time consuming. The "-sample" option may be used to configure sqlite3_expert to generate statistics based on an integer percentage of the user database as follows:
# Generate statistics based on 25% of the user database rows: ./sqlite3_expert -sample 25 -sql <sql-query> test.db # Do not generate any statistics at all: ./sqlite3_expert -sample 0 -sql <sql-query> test.db