Do I understand indexes correctly?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the difference between various kinds of database indexes. I have created a little example for myself and I don't know whether I'm understanding everything correctly.

Let's say we have an fictional database table like this:

addr col1  col2
===============
1    a     b
2    c     b
3    a     c
4    d     d
5    c     a
6    a     b
7    c     b
8    d     d
9    a     c

addr here is a physical location of the corresponding tuple. Here is my understanding of how a single-column, a multi-column and a covering index would look like (not physically, rather on a conceptual level):

create index on col1
a - 1, 3, 6, 9
c - 2, 5, 7
d - 4, 8

create index on (col1, col2)
a b - 1, 6
a c - 3, 9
c a - 5
c b - 2, 7
d d - 4, 8

create index on col1 include col2
a - 1b, 3c, 6b, 9c
c - 2b, 5a, 7b
d - 4d, 8d

So my question is: do I get it right?

You're pretty much right but this isn't the best way to conceptualize it, rather you should draw out a Tree since that is the logical data structure typically used to hold the data within an index.

Using your notation, your first example and your third example are a little hard to distinguish between what is meant to be the key / row ID for referencing the actual row and what is the included field (but I understand what you mean, given your schema details).

Here is a good article on indexing and B-Trees which has a good example of how to conceptualize it. (You can ignore the database system specific comments, such as the section on SQLite, as the generals in this article apply to pretty much any modern relational database management system.) Additionally you can play around with this B-Tree simulator to help you visualize how they grow as data is added to an indexed table.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#284136, answer score: 6