Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Administrator's Companion

Designing Indexes

Designing indexes is critical to achieving optimal performance from the indexes in the system. Creating an index is only half of the story—if the index is not actually used, then you have done nothing more than add overhead to the system. An effective index derives its effectiveness from how well it is designed and from how it is used.

Index Best Practices

The lack of indexes and poorly designed clustered indexes cause many of the performance problems that you might experience in a SQL Server system. Designing optimal indexes can make the difference between a poorly performing system and an optimally performing system. There is a delicate balance between having too many indexes, which slows down update performance, and too few ...