DL/I and CA IDMS/DB › Secondary Indexing (Index Databases) › Full and Sparse Indexing

Full and Sparse Indexing

A secondary index can be either full or sparse.

Full Index

A full index maintains an entry for each source segment occurrence in which the search field has a value.

Sparse Index

A sparse index maintains entries only for selected values in the search field. Because sparse indexing is more selective than full indexing, it provides faster search times for the desired target segments.