For creating multicolumn UNIQUE indexes we need to specify an index name on more than one column. Following example will create a multicolumn index named ‘id_fname_lname’ on the columns ‘empid’, ’first_name’, ’last_name’ of ‘employee’ table −
mysql> Create UNIQUE INDEX id_fname_lname on employee(empid,first_name,last_name); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.41 sec) Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 mysql> describe employee; +------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | empid | int(11) | YES | MUL | NULL | | | first_name | varchar(20) | YES | | NULL | | | last_name | varchar(20) | YES | | NULL | | +------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ 3 rows in set (0.12 sec)
From the result set of above query, we can see that a multiple index is defined on the table. Forgetting the details about the indexes we can run the following query −
mysql> Show index from employee\G *************************** 1. row *************************** Table: employee Non_unique: 0 Key_name: id_fname_lname Seq_in_index: 1 Column_name: empid Collation: A Cardinality: 0 Sub_part: NULL Packed: NULL Null: YES Index_type: BTREE Comment: Index_comment: *************************** 2. row *************************** Table: employee Non_unique: 0 Key_name: id_fname_lname Seq_in_index: 2 Column_name: first_name Collation: A Cardinality: 0 Sub_part: NULL Packed: NULL Null: YES Index_type: BTREE Comment: Index_comment: *************************** 3. row *************************** Table: employee Non_unique: 0 Key_name: id_fname_lname Seq_in_index: 3 Column_name: last_name Collation: A Cardinality: 0 Sub_part: NULL Packed: NULL Null: YES Index_type: BTREE Comment: Index_comment: 3 rows in set (0.00 sec)
We can observe from the above result set that the value in the ‘key_name’ filed is same because we have created the multicolumn index on all the columns of the table.