32 indexes in a table ??

guys,

in my client place (8.1.6 on win2k),

i have a table MSG which has about 9 lac records and 45 columns. it has about 32 b-tree non-unique indexes. no primary key is found , although a column "POSTNO" can be a PK.

of these 32,

18 columns have no values at all.i mean NULL. 8 columns have 30 records .
3 have some 5000 records.
2 columns have 8 lac records
2 has 2 lac records

is the indexes on the first 26 columns which have negligible records necessary ? can they be dropped ? will not the huge no. of NULL in an indexed column bring down the performance ?

and can the index on the column ( which is of low cardinality ) which has 2 lac records be changed to bitmap index ?

is too many indexes advisable in a table ?

It's urgent.
kindly guide me.

TIA. Received on Tue Jul 09 2002 - 10:26:23 CEST