Question

I am a newbie in NoSQL databases and this may sound a bit stupid but I was wondering if NoSQL databases use or need indexes?
If yes, how to make or manage them? any links?
Thanks

Answer 1

CouchDB and MongoDB definitely yes. I mentioned that in my book:

• http://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/testing-scalability/response-time-throughput-scaling-horizontal

Here are the respective docs:

• http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/btree.html
• http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes

NoSQL is, however, too fragmented to give a definite “yes, all NoSQL systems need indexes”, I believe. Most systems require and provide indexes but not at level most SQL databases do. Recently, the Cassandra people were proudly introducing secondary indexes, i.e., more than a single clustered index.

• http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-cassandra-07-secondary-indexes (well, not so recently as I remember)