'SQL Indexing not improving speed

Given an SQL database with index for (startpage, endpage), with a relation Articles(*ID*, title, startpage, endpage), why isn't a query

SELECT title 
FROM Articles 
WHERE endpage = 100;

sped up by the previous index?

Apologies for this peculiar question as it came from a practice paper without explanation.



Solution 1:[1]

Why the index shown does not help that query: because endpage is not the leftmost column of the index.

See my answer to Does Order of Fields of Multi-Column Index in MySQL Matter for more explanation (that question is about MySQL, but the answer should apply to any implementation of B-tree indexes).

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Bill Karwin