Non-clustered B-tree index
The B-tree is sometimes interpreted as a binary tree, which is not correct. The B
leading letter means balanced tree. Balanced tree is a tree consisting of root (it's the virtual root page in B-tree indexes) and intermediate nodes (if needed) helping to navigate down to leaf nodes that contain a sorted copy of indexed column(s). The balanced term means that the leaf information is accessed in the same level of depth in every section of the tree.
SQL Server enables the creation of up to 499 non-clustered indexes on one table, but this is a theoretical limit in most cases. Each index can have up to 16 columns with sum of byte lengths up to 900 Bytes. One record saved to the index structure is called index key.
B-tree ...
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