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.
Indexing
Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 2, Size Matters
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…
Read More
Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 1, The Basics
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…
Read More
SQL Server Partitioning: Not the Best Practices for Everything
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…
Read More
SQL Server training for developers: primary keys & indexes
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…
Read More