Introduction to Indexes: Part 2 – The clustered index

In the second part of her series on indexing, MVP Gail Shaw examines clustered indexes. Learn what this index is, how it differs from a heap, and how it can help your queries.

Introduction to Indexes

Indexes are critical to good performance. However many people don't understand how indexes well. MVP Gail Shaw provides us with an introductory article on the basics of indexing.

Index Management

This article demonstrates an Index Management strategy to tackle day to day performance issues due to improper indexes.

Identify Obsolete Indexes

Drop indexes no longer being used.

B-tree

Keep Your SQL Server Indexes Fragmentation Free

Routine maintenance can keep index fragmentation to a minimum—with some help from an index-defragmenting script.

Understanding Scans And Seeks

Whether a query uses Scan or Seek can have a big impact on the cost of excuting that query. This article examines when each is used and which is optimal.

Back to basics: Optimizing SQL Server indexes

When created and maintained correctly, indexes help SQL Server retrieve data quickly. See how to ensure your SQL Server environment is running up to speed.

Unique constraints

Retaining historical index usage statistics for SQL Server - Part 3

In this, the third of the four part series on persisting the rowset results from the indexing Dynamic Management Views cached in temporary internal SQL Server structures we will explore what is required to store the missing index-related metadata.