Django has a unique_for_date property you can set when adding a SlugField to your model. This causes the slug to be unique only for the Date of the field you specify:
What about unique_together?
class Example(models.Model):
title = models.CharField()
slug = models.SlugField(db_index=False)
category = models.ForeignKey(Category)
class Meta:
unique_together = (('slug','category'),)
# or also working since Django 1.0:
# unique_together = ('slug','category',)
This creates an index, but it is not outside of Django ;) Or did I miss the point?