The Power Of Proper Indexing
This image is an actual screen shot of one of our production SQL Server’s CPU usage, taken from our SQL Sentry monitoring system. Obviously this server was under some strain. …
Will You Run Out Of INT And BIGINT Identities In SQL Server?
In the war over Identities vs GUIDs as clustered indexes, one of the arguments in favor of Unique Identifiers is that you may run out of numbers when using a …
Disabling An Index Drops Compression
This post is more of an FYI, and to remind myself in case I run into it again down the road. Here at work we have a very large, very …
Recover Deleted Indexes With SQL Server Metrics Pack
In my latest enhancement to SQL Server Metrics Pack , I added a new feature to the index metrics scripts that automatically generates a CREATE INDEX script and stores it …
SQL Server Metrics Pack Update – September 2019
This morning I updated the Index Metrics piece of SQL Server Metrics Pack. This update mainly introduced some new functionality, with a few minor bug fixes. The two big enhancements …
SQL Scripts: How To Find Missing Indexes
One of the really cool things that SQL Server does is keep up with index statistics behind the scenes. It knows how an index has been used, how often it …
SQL Scripts: How To Find Filtered Indexes
Filtered indexes are one of those neat little SQL Server features that a lot of people don’t seem to know about, or if they do they don’t use them very …
Index Basics: Find Tables That Do Not Have A Clustered Index
In a previous Index Basics post we went over the importance of having a Clustered Index on your tables, and we learned that SQL Server will automatically create a Clustered …
Index Basics: Hidden Costs Associated With Indexes
I have a confession. When I was a developer, I didn’t understand indexes in SQL Server. I rarely added them to my tables, and when I did there was not …
SQL Scripts: How To Find Index Usage
This post is part of an ongoing SQL Scripts series, in which I list useful queries that I use in my day to day database administration. If you are interested in code …
SQL Scripts: How To Find Index Fragmentation
This is the first post in an ongoing SQL Scripts series, in which I list useful queries that I use in my day to day database administration. What Is Index Fragmentation? …
Persist And Aggregate Index Stats Across Server Restarts
(This script is part of my SQL Server Metrics Pack project that is now available on GitHub. If you like the code below and find it useful, I encourage you to check …
Using PowerShell To Store sp_BlitzIndex Results In A Table
I really like Brent Ozar’s sp_BlitzIndex procedure. It offers a lot of great insight into the indexes in your databases. If you are not currently using it, you should check it …
Finding Recurring Index Fragmentation Issues
One of the nice things about Ola Hallengren’s maintenance solution is that it has the option to log its operations to a table. This gives you ability to do a …
Index Basics: Nonclustered Indexes, Part 1
In SQL Server, an index is used to speed the retrieval of data from a table. Indexes are built from one or more columns in the table, and SQL Server uses these Indexes …
Index Basics: Clustered Indexes
In SQL Server, an index is used to speed the retrieval of data from a table. Indexes are built from one or more columns in the table, and SQL Server uses these Indexes …