Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Unleashed

Chapter 20. Creating and Managing Indexes

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What’s New in Creating and Managing Indexes

• Types of Indexes

• Creating Indexes

• Managing Indexes

• Dropping Indexes

• Online Indexing Operations

• Indexes on Views

Just like the index in this book, an index on a table or view allows you to efficiently find the information you are looking for in a database. SQL Server does not require indexes in order to retrieve data from tables because it can perform a full table scan to retrieve a result set. However, doing a table scan is analogous to scanning every page in this book to find a word or reference you are looking for.

This chapter introduces the different types of indexes that are available in SQL Server 2005 to keep your database access efficient. It focuses ...