Indexing - Category Archive

The following is a list of all entries from the Indexing category.

Creating the SSC Maintenance Plan: Part 3

Note: This is an in-depth article that exceeds 5,000 words, and provides a case-study of how a maintenance plan could be implemented on a single, plain vanilla, SQL Server instance.
As I have mentioned in previous parts of this article series (part 1, part 2), I act as a consultant DBA for the SQLServerCentral.com (SSC) and ...read more


What Would You Like to See in a New Book on Indexing?

I am currently in the early stages of writing an outline for a new book on indexing, targeted towards novice DBAs. While this topic has been done to death in hundreds of articles, presentations, and books, I think there is still room for a book that makes the topic easy to read and easy to ...read more


Don’t Forget to Maintain Your Indexes

So long as data is inserted, updated and deleted from tables, indexes will become fragmented over time, and performance will suffer. Index maintenance is vital to keeping databases and their users happy. In this article, I go through the key index maintenance tasks and identify more essential areas that are a DBA’s duty to maintain. ...read more


Brad’s Sure Guide to Indexes

There are many different types of index that exist in SQL Server. In this guide, I look at what a table and index are, before exploring how SQL Server 2005 and 2008 indexes work, including those that are filtered, special and compressed. Read more…


Don’t Make Dumb Mistakes by Duplicating Indexes

Just today, I was reviewing the indexing of a database used by a third-party application. As part of my review, I ran a script against it that is used to identify duplicate indexes. The script I used was written Paul Nielsen, the author of the SQL Server Bible; and Itzik Ben-Gan. The script is available ...read more


Reasons Why You May Not Want to Use a Heap

I have started compiling a list of reasons why heaps aren’t usually a good choice when designing a database. Now, I didn’t say that heaps are always bad, but in most cases, I think they should be avoided (read the list to see why).
As I compiled the list, in some cases I have had the ...read more


Copyright 2009 Brad M McGehee