There is a feature, called index skip scan that has been in Oracle since version 9i. When I across this, it seemed like a very clever trick, but not a critical capability. More recently, I have been advocating DW on SSD in approrpiate situations, and I am thinking this is now a valuable feature in keeping the number of nonclustered indexes to a minimum. Briefly, suppose we have an index with key columns: Col1 , Col2 , in that order. Obviously, a query with a search argument (SARG) on Col1 can use...(read more)