Free indexing books, awesome!
Before I tell you how, lets start with what we are talking about here. If you weren’t aware, last summer I worked with Grant Fritchey (Blog | @gfritchey) to update Expert Performance Indexing for SQL Server. The new edition jumps from 10 to 15 chapters and contains a bunch of new stuff. This includes material that didn’t have a chance to include in the first edition, some chapter reorganization, and updates to include information for SQL Server 2014.
So, how to give away these books?
I figure the best way to do this is to talk about indexes. For the next 13 Fridays, I’m going to propose an indexing questions related to different chapters of the book. The week following each question, I’ll select one of the comments at random and send out a book. Basically, tell a good story, make me laugh, share something unique and you got a chance to get the book.
For week one, let’s start with some fundamentals of indexes and bullet 1 from chapter 1 – why build indexes? What interesting adventures have you had in the past where you built an index and dramatically improved performance? Leave your thoughts in a comment below and I’ll select the first person to receive a book a week from now.
June, 10 Update
The winner for the book this week is Cujo DeSoque. I loved how he identified a poor index and then disabled it when he wasn’t allowed to drop it. Solving both requirements… in spirit.
Here’s a summary of the other comments:
- Tim talked about how improving performance with an index led to him becoming a DBA.
- Todd talked about crazy DBAs who had no indexes.
- Ken included a story where indexes were avoided due to their percieved imapct on triggers.
- SQLPRODDBA performance was improved from 30 minutes to 2 seconds with an index.
- Lohith shared a situation where a lack of indexes led to CPU utilization issues.
Thanks all for sharing your stories. Be sure to check out the next set of indexing questions and a chance for the second book.
