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How To Decide if You Should Use Table Partitioning

Last Updated October 7, 2020

Great volumes have been written about table partitioning. It’s a complex feature and you can read for days to just understand how you might apply it. But will it improve performance for you? Table partitioning produces great benefits for some applications, but causes giant headaches for others. How do you know if you should invest your…

Kendra Little Explains How to Design Smarter Indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Kendra Little

Indexing, SQL Server

How do you know which indexes to create to improve your database performance? Microsoft Certified Master Kendra Little shows you how to find a missing index, decide on the best index definition, and measure the usefulness of your new index. If you know the basics of what a database index does and want to learn…

Indexing for Deletes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Indexing, SQL Server

If you’re only indexing to make reads faster, you need to think again. Indexes can make every operation in the database faster, even deletes. The Problem: Deletes are Very Slow I was lazily researching new development techniques one day when I received an email from a client asking why deletes could be slow. I rattled…

Well, it was good, but I dunno about amazing.

Seeks, Scans, and Statistics in the Grocery Store

Last Updated July 14, 2019

Brent Ozar

Indexing, T-SQL

Building an execution plan is a lot like going shopping. Before I leave the house, I need to think about a few things: How many items do I need? I take a glance at my grocery list to see roughly how many things I’m shopping for. What stores am I going to visit? I can’t…

SQL Server Index Tuning Tip: Identify Overlaps

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Indexing

Sometimes less is more – and indexes are definitely one of those times. Learn how to identify overlapping indexes and why they’re so bad for performance, and learn about SQL Server 2005’s new INCLUDE feature.

Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 2, Size Matters

Last Updated July 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Index Maintenance, SQL Server

Last week, I blogged about the basics of SQL Server index fragmentation: why it happens, how to fix it, and how often people are fixing it. I left you with a cliffhanger: it seemed that the frequency of defrag jobs didn’t appear to affect fragmentation levels: Databases with no index defragmentation were an average of…

Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 1, The Basics

Last Updated July 13, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Index Maintenance, SQL Server

We asked the community for index fragmentation information for data mining purposes, and the results are in – and interesting. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll talk about some of the results we found in the field. What Is SQL Server Fragmentation? SQL Server stores data in pages. To make things easy, think of…

SQL Server Partitioning: Not the Best Practices for Everything

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Partitioning, SQL Server

When SQL 2005 was in beta, I clapped my hands and jumped for joy the first time I played with partitioning. I’ve done a lot of data warehouse work, and partitioning lets the DBA break down massive tables into smaller, easy-to-manage chunks. We can put heavily accessed parts of the table onto fast storage, and…

SQL Server training for developers: primary keys & indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Indexing, SQL Server

I had to do some developer training last week and I wrote up a paper on the basics of primary keys and indexes. Sure, there’s tons of similar stuff around the net, but this is MINE, baby. Our Table: Phone Numbers For our evil training purposes, let’s say we work for the phone company, and…

Indexing

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