Benefits of Indexes
SQL Server queries can benefit from the existence of suitable indexes in the following cases:
Exact-match queries—When searching for rows with specific key values. These are queries with a WHERE clause to restrict the query to specific values for every key column.
Range queries—When solving queries that search for a range of values in a column.
Filtering for values in the foreign key to solve a join operation—When using a JOIN predicate to search for rows in a table based on keys from a second table.
Hash and merge join operations—In some cases, having an index can speed up the execution of a JOIN algorithm, because the data is exactly in the order that the JOIN algorithm uses.
Covering a query—To avoid a full-table scan, when ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access