SQL Server Column Considerations and Column Placement

Determining which columns to select for your indexes is critical. Having a little knowledge of how your application is using your database columns and how SQL Server processes indexes helps you make good decisions when you create your indexes.

Index usage overview

This view reports almost everything you want to know about your indexes

Primary Keys

Check status of HEAP tables

This SP reports the status of your heap tables. It gives you an overview of fragmentation, ghost record counts and forwarded record counts. Another reason to create a clustered index!

Index Seeks, Scans, and Lookups

This script may help identify tables impacted by frequently-occurring scans.

PASS AppDev Presents: SQL Server Indexing

While indexing traditionally has been the concern of the DBA, it's important for developers to understand both the usefulness and the impact of indexes in your relational database. With the right indexes your application will perform like a Formula One racer, without them performance will better resemble a Model T. This presentation will explain how indexes work, what options are available to you in SQL Server 2008, and how to tune your application and your database for the best performance.By Allen White, 2/9/2010, 1:00EST

Indexes in SQL Server 2005

Database Indexing Development Lifecycle...Say What?

Creating good indexes on your database doesn't happen by mistake--you need to have a plan. Greg Larsen shows you how, beginning with a discussion on the indexing development lifecycle.

Top 10 steps to optimize data access in SQL Server. Part III (Apply advanced indexing and denormalization)

Even after you have applied proper indexing along with re-factoring your TSQLs with best practices, some data access routines might still be there, which would be expensive, in terms of their execution time. There must have been some smart ways to deal with these. Yes there are. SQL server offers you some rich indexing techniques that you might have not used earlier. These could surprise you with the performance benefits they possibly offer. Let us start implementing those advanced indexing techniques:

Data searches that leverage existing indexes

Recent installments of our SQL Server 2005 Express Edition series have been discussing its implementation of Full Text Indexing. This article focuses on data searches, which leverage existing indexes, taking into account such features as noise words and thesaurus files.