By definition, the changes will also be small. It's just not possible for it to blow up in a way that would cause a problem, because we're only talking about tiny tables. There's nothing you can do in a single[1] index for a table with 350 rows that will cause any heartache vs. an unindexed table with 350 rows. 4 of the 5 examples in the article are just "this table is too small to care."
[1] Edited per discussion; a large number of indices on a small table can still get you in trouble.
> There's nothing you can do in an index for a table with 350 rows
I meant if you have 100s of indices -- it might be slow even on small tables.
I actually had a production issues from using a lot of indices, but it's not apples-to-apples with current discussion, because the table sizes, DBMS and update rates were much larger, fixed by removing indices and splitting table into multiple.
Wow! You're right; I wasn't considering that anyone would try to have that many indices. 100 is a lot. I should qualify my statement and say that you won't get in trouble with one index on a small table. I've edited my post accordingly.
In those sort of cases your schema is probably not the correct pattern and needs to be reviewed.
I had one proj where they had 40 indexes on one table. Inserts were terrible for that table. No one wanted to touch it as it happened to be the table where everything was at. They started pulling out 'nosql' sharding and other sorts of tools to fix it. Anything to not change that table with 200+ columns and 30 indexes and the flotilla of stored procs to go with it. They even ported it from MSSQL to Oracle. Thinking somehow magically oracle was going to make the poor schema run faster.
Even if all you're updating is an int32 column from 1 to 2, the RDBMS is still writing much more data than 4 bytes. At a minimum it's making a copy of the full page the data is in prior to the update (so 8k for pg, 16k for mysql) and usually multiples of that (mysql writes both before/after).
[1] Edited per discussion; a large number of indices on a small table can still get you in trouble.