Index types: B-tree (default)—good for equality and range; Hash—equality only; Bitmap—low cardinality, data warehouses; GIN/GiST—full-text, JSON. Benefits: faster lookups, reduced full scans, faster joins, enforcement of uniqueness (unique index). Drawbacks: storage overhead, write slowdown. Best practice: create indexes on foreign keys and frequently filtered columns; use covering indexes (include columns in index) to avoid table lookups; analyze execution plans before/after....
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