Expert Performance Indexing in SQL Server, Second Edition

Introduction

Indexes are important—vastly important. No single structure aids in retrieving data from a database more than an index. Indexes represent both how data is stored and the access paths by which data can be retrieved from your database. Without indexes, a database is an unordered mess minus the roadmap to find the information you want.

Throughout my experience with customers, one of the most common resolutions that I provide for performance tuning and application outages is the right indexes for their databases. Often, the effort of adding an index or two to the primary tables within a database provides significant performance improvements—much more so than tuning the database statement on. This is because an index can affect the many ...