Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

What’s New in Creating and Managing Indexes

The creation and management of indexes are among the most important performance activities in SQL Server. You will find that indexes and the tools to manage them in SQL Server 2012 are very similar to those in SQL Server 2008. There are, however, some minor changes to the index-oriented GUI screens. These changes include the ability to select the type of index that you want to create directly from the New Index menu and some organizational changes in the New Index screen.

Columnstore indexes are a new type of index that was added in SQL Server 2012. These indexes offer a powerful new way to accelerate data warehouse workloads. When this new type of index is combined with enhanced query processing features, ...