Chapter 14
Indexing Your Database
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER
- Index-Related Features Available in SQL Server 2012 and Previous Versions
- How Partitioned Tables and Indexes Enable your Databases to be More Manageable and Scalable
- Implementing Partitioned Tables and Indexes
- Maintaining and Tuning Indexes
One of the most important functions of production database administrators is to ensure that query times are consistent with service-level agreements (SLAs) or within user expectations. One of the most effective techniques to improve query performance is to create indexes.
Query performance is generally measured in the amount of time the query takes to run and the amount of work and resources it consumes. Long-running and expensive queries consume resources over an extended period of time and may slow down or cause applications, reports, and other database operations to time-out.
For this reason understanding what indexing features are available in SQL Server 2012 and how to implement them is essential to any production DBA.
This chapter offers an overview of the indexing-related features available in SQL Server 2012, including the newest feature known as column-store indexes, which can greatly increase query performance over traditional row-based indexes.
NOTEWORTHY INDEX-RELATED FEATURES IN SQL SERVER
This section highlights the new indexing features introduced in SQL Server 2012 and overviews the index-related features introduced in previous versions of SQL Server.
What’s New for ...
