You’re a developer or a DBA, and you’re comfortable writing queries to get the data you need. You’re much less comfortable trying to design the right indexes for your database server. In this series of videos, you’ll learn how the SQL Server engine looks at your indexes and builds your query results.
Before you get started, print out this 3-page PDF built from Stack Overflow’s database pages. Sounds crazy, but having these pages in hand is absolutely critical to understanding these concepts.
In 90 minutes of videos, you’ll learn:
- The differences between clustered and nonclustered indexes
- How (and when) to make a covering index
- The basics of execution plans
- What determines sargability
- What SQL Server uses to estimate the memory your query needs
- What happens when those estimates are wrong
- When you should get fresh estimates by recompiling the query
- How to avoid SQL Server’s public toilet, TempDB