Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Administrator's Companion

Summary

As you have seen in this chapter, indexes can be very helpful for reducing the number of I/Os required to retrieve data and for speeding access to that data. This chapter has offered many tips and guidelines for creating and using indexes effectively. As a review of some of those, here again are some index best practices:

• Use indexes only when necessary.

• Index large tables.

• Create indexes as narrowly as possible.

• Use covering queries and indexes or included columns indexes where possible.

By creating indexes and properly maintaining these indexes, the system performance can be optimized. Indexes can be quite beneficial, but beware that poorly clustered indexes can do more harm than good.