Indexing

Free Webcast Wednesday: Pushing the Envelope with Indexing for Edge Case Performance

Indexing
15 Comments
Most of the time, conventional clustered and non-clustered indexes work just fine – but not all the time. When you really need to push performance, hand-crafted special index types can give you an amazing boost. Join Microsoft Certified Master, Brent Ozar, to learn the right use cases for filtered indexes, indexed views, computed columns, table…
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[Video] What Percent Complete Is That Index Build?

SQL Server 2017 & newer have a new DMV, sys.index_resumable_operations, that show you the percent_completion for index creations and rebuilds. It works, but…only if the data isn’t changing. But of course your data is changing – that’s the whole point of doing these operations as resumable. If they weren’t changing, we could just let the operations…
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WHERE GETDATE() BETWEEN StartDate AND EndDate Is Hard to Tune.

Development, Indexing
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Say you’ve got a memberships (or policies) table, and each membership has start & end dates: Transact-SQL USE StackOverflow; GO DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.UsersMemberships; CREATE TABLE dbo.UsersMemberships (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, UserId INT NOT NULL, StartDate DATETIME NOT NULL, EndDate DATETIME NOT NULL, CancelledEarlyDate DATETIME NULL); GO 1234567891011 USE StackOverflow;GODROP TABLE IF…
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How to Think Like the Engine: When a Seek Isn’t

In our last episode, I introduced the concept of scan predicates: execution plan operations that weren’t able to seek directly to the rows they needed. Let’s take another query: Transact-SQL DropIndexes; GO CREATE INDEX IX_LastAccessDate_Id_DisplayName_Age ON dbo.Users(LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age); GO SELECT Id FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate > '1800/01/01' AND DisplayName = N'Brent Ozar'; GO…
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How to Think Like the Engine: Index Column Order Matters a LOT.

We’ve been working with the clustered index of the Users table, which is on the Identity column – starts at 1 and goes up to a bajillion: And in a recent episode, we added a wider nonclustered index on LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, and Age: Transact-SQL CREATE INDEX IX_LastAccessDate_Id_DisplayName_Age ON dbo.Users(LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age); GO 123…
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