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.
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
Resources to follow along:
- Print out this 5-page PDF built from Stack Overflow’s database pages. Sounds crazy, but having these pages in hand is absolutely critical to understanding these concepts.
- Slide deck
- Demo scripts – are in each module’s page as you follow along
Preview
Next Steps
When you’re ready to learn more, check out my one-day online course, Fundamentals of Index Tuning. You’ll learn:
- How to design indexes for a query without looking at its execution plan
- How to pick the order of keys in an index
- How query parameter values can change which index is better
- Where to find index recommendations using query plans, DMVs, and sp_BlitzIndex
- How SQL Server’s index recommendations are built, and why they’re often wrong