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Milvus — Storage Model Part Three, Data Indexing

Tony
6 min readFeb 3, 2024

In the world of databases, optimizing data retrieval speed is paramount. The ability to quickly and efficiently access the required information can significantly impact the performance of an application. This is where database indexes come into play. Milvus, a powerful and versatile vector database, understands the importance of indexing and provides robust support for it.

What Is a Database Index?

Before go into how Milvus handles indexing, let’s briefly review what a database index is. In essence, a database index is a data structure that acts as a roadmap to expedite data retrieval from the database. It enhances query performance by allowing the database system to locate the desired data more rapidly, similar to how an index in a book helps you find specific content quickly.

Here’s a simple example of a database index in the context of a relational database, using a hypothetical “Employees” table:

Suppose we have an “Employees” table with the following structure:

In this table, “EmployeeID” is the primary key, which means it uniquely identifies each employee. However, suppose we frequently need to retrieve employees based on their department. Without an index, a database would need to scan the entire table row by row to find employees in a…

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Tony
Tony

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