Having the following schema:
CREATE TABLE test_table(
cryptid varchar(255)
);
CREATE INDEX cryptid_index ON test_table (cryptid);
I am trying to a unique contraint to the column.
ALTER TABLE test_table ADD constraint crypid_unique_contraint UNIQUE(cryptid);
But this runs into an error:
Could not execute 'ALTER TABLE test_table ADD constraint crypid_unique_contraint ...' Error: (dberror) [261]: invalid index name: column list already indexed
I can understand that the column is already indexed because I have created the index by myself. But I want the column to be unique. Is there a way to do this?
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Answer
This is indeed an undocumented limitation in the current HANA versions.
The only way to create a unique constraint on this column is to first drop the single-column index present on this column.
I would consider the fact that this is not documented a (docu-)bug. However, the fact that existing indexes cannot be generally reused for uniqueness checks is not.
Single-column indexes in HANA’s column store (which is what you use by default) tables are not B-tree indexes. Instead, these are inverted indexes into the column store structure of the main store-part of a column store table column.
These inverted structures cannot be checked for duplicates in the current transactional context as easily as B-tree indexes could.
This, I believe, is the reason for
a) implementing the uniqueness check only on a specific index implementation in the column store,
and
b) making the system behavior (not allowing the “conversion” of an existing index into a unique index) consistent across all table types.
As a general comment: for column store tables the benefit of single-column indexes for lookup/point-read scenarios is very often not worth the additional storage & compute resource consumption. This type of index practically doubles the memory requirement for the indexed column. So the speed-up in looking up a specific value should be worthwhile this additional permanent resource consumption.