Don’t trust the name of an index to tell you what it is. The name is wrong, or at least that’s what you have to assume.

I’m a huge fan of index naming conventions, with my favorite being starting out by saying it’s an index (IDX) followed by the table name, then the key columns, the letters INCL if there are included columns, each included column listed (if reasonable, just do all or nothing for each index), a U or N denoting if it’s unique or not, then a C or N denoting if it’s clustered or not. However, there are too many times I’ve seen an index naming convention get me in trouble where the index IDX_TableName_Key1_Key2_Key3_INCL_Incl1_Incl2_U_N actually not have the column Key1 in it, and it wasn’t unique either.

My answer for that is to query the system tables to tell me what each index is. This is exactly the information I would like to see in a naming convention and pulled from a source that’s never wrong.

SELECT TableName = t.name
    , IndexName = i.name
    , i.is_unique
    , IndexType = i.type_desc
    , FileGroupName = d.name
    , KeyColumnList = substring((SELECT (', ' + c.name)
                            FROM sys.index_columns ic
                                INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON ic.object_id = c.object_id AND ic.column_id = c.column_id
                            WHERE i.object_id = ic.object_id AND i.index_id = ic.index_id
                                AND ic.is_included_column = 0
                            ORDER BY ic.key_ordinal
                            FOR XML PATH ('')
                            ), 3, 2000)
    , IncludedColumnList = substring((SELECT (', ' + c.name)
                            FROM sys.index_columns ic
                                INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON ic.object_id = c.object_id AND ic.column_id = c.column_id
                            WHERE i.object_id = ic.object_id AND i.index_id = ic.index_id
                                AND ic.is_included_column = 1
                            ORDER BY ic.key_ordinal
                            FOR XML PATH ('')
                            ), 3, 2000)
FROM sys.tables t
    INNER JOIN sys.indexes i ON t.object_id = i.object_id
    INNER JOIN sys.data_spaces d ON i.data_space_id = d.data_space_id
WHERE t.name LIKE '%'
    --AND (i.is_unique = 1 OR i.type_desc = 'Clustered')
ORDER BY 1, 2, 4, 3

You may say that’s a temporary one-off inqury the doesn’t fix anything, and it is. However, the permanent fix is very invasive, will void your support contracts, can cause damage, would cause pieces of future upgrades to fail, may not work if it generates a name that’s too long, and other minor details. Assuming you have a home-grown database and absolutely no query hints specifying an index anywhere in your code, have a dev environment recently refreshed from prod, and have looked into every other issue that I never even considered, do I have some code for you!!!

SELECT Command = '--DON''T RUN THIS WITHOUT FIRST LOOKING INTO THE CONSEQUENCES AND UPDATING YOUR RESUME'
UNION 
SELECT Command = 'EXEC sp_rename ''' + TableName + '.' + IndexName + ''', ''' + 'IX_' + TableName + ColumnList + case when len(IncludeList) > 3 then '_INCL' else '' end + ISNULL(IncludeList, '') + '_' + case is_unique when 1 then 'U' else 'N' end + '_' + left(IndexType COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS, 1) + ''' , ''INDEX'''
FROM (
        SELECT TableName = t.name
            , IndexName = i.name
            , i.is_unique
            , IndexType = i.type_desc
            , FileGroupName = d.name
            , ColumnList = substring((SELECT ('_' + c.name)
                                    FROM sys.index_columns ic
                                        INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON ic.object_id = c.object_id AND ic.column_id = c.column_id
                                    WHERE i.object_id = ic.object_id AND i.index_id = ic.index_id
                                        AND ic.is_included_column = 0
                                    ORDER BY ic.key_ordinal
                                    FOR XML PATH ('')
                                    ), 1, 2000)
            , IncludeList = substring((SELECT ('_' + c.name)
                                    FROM sys.index_columns ic
                                        INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON ic.object_id = c.object_id AND ic.column_id = c.column_id
                                    WHERE i.object_id = ic.object_id AND i.index_id = ic.index_id
                                        AND ic.is_included_column = 1
                                    ORDER BY ic.key_ordinal
                                    FOR XML PATH ('')
                                    ), 1, 2000)
        FROM sys.tables t
            INNER JOIN sys.indexes i ON t.object_id = i.object_id
            INNER JOIN sys.data_spaces d ON i.data_space_id = d.data_space_id
        WHERE t.name IN (
                  'Table_1'
                , 'Table_2')
    )x
ORDER BY 1

Filed under: Indexes, Scripts, SQL Server Tagged: column list, Included Column, Index, key column, Naming Convention, Script, sys.columns, sys.indexes, sys.index_columns