Submitted by: Volker Rehn (vr2_s18)

Syncing metadata of two databases: If the master db has inactive indices which are missing in the target, on creation they will be activated in the target db, do a full data scan, and only afterwards they can then be deactivated by alter index. An optional "as active/inactive" clause would give more control over when an index is actually built. Oracle and MySQL have visible/invisible for indices, but that only removes the index from being used by the optimizer, it still performs a data scan on creation. Apparently the SQL standard does not regulate index creation. The syntax could be

CREATE [UNIQUE] [ASC[ENDING] | DESC[ENDING]]
INDEX indexname [AS ACTIVE | INACTIVE] ON tablename
{(col [, col ...]) | COMPUTED BY (<expression>)};

ACTIVE being the default as it is now. Similar to how triggers are defined.