Use index to speed up query using values from different tables - postgresql

Question

I have a table products, a table orders and a table orderProducts.
Products have a name as a PK (apple, banana, mango) and a price .
orders have a created_at date and an id as a PK.
orderProducts connects orders and products, so they have a product_name and an order_id. Now I would like to show all orders for a given product that happened in the last 24 hours.
I use the following query:
SELECT
orders.id,
orders.created_at,
products.name,
products.price
FROM
orderProducts
JOIN products ON
products.name=orderProducts.product
JOIN orders ON
orders.id=orderProducts.order
WHERE
products.name='banana'
AND
orders.created_at BETWEEN NOW() - INTERVAL '24 HOURS' AND NOW()
ORDER BY
orders.created_at
This works, but I would like to optimize this query with an index. This index would need to first be ordered by
the product name, so it can be filtered
then the created_at of the order in descending order, so it can select only the ones from 24 hours ago
The problem is, that from what I have seen, indexes can only be created on a single table, without the possibility of joining another tables values to it. Since two individual index do not solve this problem either, I was wondering if there was an alternative way to optimize this particular query.
Here are the table scripts:
CREATE TABLE products
(
name text PRIMARY KEY,
price integer,
)
CREATE TABLE orders
(
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
created_at TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW(),
)
CREATE TABLE orderProducts
(
product text REFERENCES products(name),
"order" integer REFERENCES orders(id),
)

Answer 1

First of all. Please do not put indices everywhere - that lead to slower changing operations...
As proposed by #Laurenz Albe - do not guess - check.
Other than that. Note that you know product name, price is repeated - so you can query that once. Question if in your case two queries are going to be faster then single one... Check that.
Please read docs. I would try this index:
create index orders_id_created_at on orders(created_at desc, id)
Normally id should go first, since that is unique, however here system should be able to filter out on both predicates - where/join. Just guessing here.
orderProducts I would like to see index on both columns, however for this query only one should be needed. In practice you are going from products to orders, or other way - both paths are possible, that is why I've wrote about indexing both columns. I would use two separate indexes:
create index orderproducts_product_id on orderproducts (product_id) include (order_id);
create index orderproducts_order_id on orderproducts (order_id) include (product_id);
Probably that is not changing much, but... idea is to use only index, but not the table itself.

Answer 2

These rules are important in terms of performance:
Integer index faster than string index, therefore, you should try to make the primary keys always be an integer. Because join the tables uses primary keys too.
If when in where clauses always use two fields then we must create an index for both fields.
Foreign-Keys are not indexed, you must create an index for foreign-key fields manually.
So, recommended table scripts will be are that:
CREATE TABLE products
(
id serial primary key,
name text,
price integer
);
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX products_name_idx ON products USING btree (name);
CREATE TABLE orders
(
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
created_at TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW()
);
CREATE INDEX orders_created_at_idx ON orders USING btree (created_at);
CREATE TABLE orderProducts
(
product_id integer REFERENCES products(id),
order_id integer REFERENCES orders(id)
);
CREATE INDEX orderproducts_product_id_idx ON orderproducts USING btree (product_id, order_id);
---- OR ----
CREATE INDEX orderproducts_product_id ON orderproducts (product_id);
CREATE INDEX orderproducts_order_id ON orderproducts (order_id);