Clustered index scan vs Clustered Index seek

  • I was looking at the execution plan of a query but I'm not able to understand why it's doing a clustered index scan instead of seek. What can i do to make it a seek?

  • Please post the actual execution plan and the query. We can't help without that.

    In the meantime I can recommend this reading => http://sqlinthewild.co.za/index.php/2009/01/09/seek-or-scan

  • Can you post the execution plan with the query?

  • In general it's either the query, the statistics or the indexes. Take a look at the predicate values in the properties of the scan. It'll tell you what it's searching on.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • Most people don't understand that a seek isn't always more efficient than a scan, and can in fact be unbelievably LESS efficient. If you are hitting (or the optimizer estimates you will hit) more than a few percentage of the total rows in a table a scan quickly starts to be more efficient. Are you by chance either hitting a large percentage of rows in the table and/or doing a HASH join after this table scan?

    I will chime in with the others about posting the query and the actual query plan for us to review so we can help you.

    Best,
    Kevin G. Boles
    SQL Server Consultant
    SQL MVP 2007-2012
    TheSQLGuru on googles mail service

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