My career in data started as a SQL Server performance specialist, which meant I was deep into the nuances of indexes, locking and blocking, execution plan analysis and query design. These days I’m more in the world of the open table format such as Apache Iceberg. Having learned the internals of both transactional and analytical database systems, I find the use of the word “index” interesting as they mean very different things to different systems.I see the term “index” used loosely when discussi...