I like lists. In particular, I like to make little lists of Oracle features that have some commonality in the way they work, or in what they do.
Today's list is Oracle Features For Accessing Part Of A Table Quickly. Quicker than scanning the whole table anyway, and assuming that the table is not of trivial size. Here's what I have so far:
- Creating an Index: obviously.
- Making the Table Index-Organized: Is that too similar to Option 1 to justify a new heading, do you think?
- Placing The Table In A Cluster: Hash or indexed.
- Partitioning The Table: Partition pruning being the key feature here, or through using the PARTITION or SUBPARTITION clauses of the query table expression.
- Creating a Materialized View: By precomputing the result set for a query that requires only part of the full table. Query rewrite optional, I suppose.
Off the top of my head, that's all I can think of right now. Other suggestions welcome.