Take a deep dive into perhaps the single most important facet of good performance: indexes, and how to best use them. Recent updates to SQL Server have made it possible to create indexes in situations that in the past would have prevented their use.

Other improvements covered in this book include new dynamic management views, the ability to pause and resume index maintenance, and the ability to more easily recover from failures during index creation and maintenance operations. This new edition also brings new content around the indexing of columnstore and in-memory tables, showing how these new types of tables and the queries that execute against them can also benefit from good indexing practices.

The book begins with explanations of the types of indexes and how they are stored in databases. Moving deeper into the topic, and further into the book, you will look at the statistics that are accumulated both by indexes and on indexes. You will better understand what indexes are doing in the database and what can be done to mitigate and improve their effect on performance. You will get a look at the Index Advisor now available in Azure SQL Database, and learn how to review and maintain the health of your indexes. The final chapters present a guided tour through a number of scenarios showing approaches you can take to investigate, mitigate, and improve the performance of your database.

What You Will Learn

• Properly index row store, columnstore, and in-memory tables


• Review statistics to understand indexing choices made by the optimizer


• Apply indexing strategies such as covering indexes, included columns, and index intersections


• Recognize and remove unnecessary indexes


• Design effective indexes for full-text, spatial, and XML data types


• Manage the big picture: Encompass all indexes in adatabase, and all database instances on a server

Who This Book Is For

Database administrators and developers who are ready to lift the performance of their database environment by thoughtfully building indexes to speed up queries that matter the most and make a difference to the business