SQL Server® 2008 Administration: Real World Skills for MCITP Certification and Beyond

Creating Advanced Indexes

Two of the most important indexes to understand in SQL Server 2008 are covering indexes and filtered indexes. Covering indexes existed in previous versions of SQL Server, but filtered indexes are new. The exercises in this section will walk you through the process of creating each type of index.

Creating a Covering Index

In this section, you will create a covering index, which is a special multicolumn index used to cover frequently executed queries. The Customers table must exist in the Books database. In order to perform the steps in Exercise 10.4, you should have already performed the steps in Exercises 10.1 through 10.3.

You may have noticed that users are performing many queries that look like the following:

 SELECT ...