SQL Server 2000 Indexing Best Practices (DAT348)

Tech*Ed Conference Session, 75 minutes
Written/Presented by Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com

The base structures of your tables are either ordered or unordered... Which is better and for what purpose? If ordered is chosen, what type of column(s) should the data be ordered by? Is the decision solely based on query performance or are there other factors? Whether your system is 24x7x365 or a small system just trying to setup for future growth and improved performance this session is for you! In this session, we will cover the often overlooked impacts of poorly chosen clustered indexes, where/why clustered indexes help the most and how the type of table and the type/frequency of your queries affect your decisions. But we're not done yet - if you don't have proper maintenance practices in place your performance will degrade due to fragmentation. Index fragmentation can negatively impact query performance, require more IOs in large scans and even require more time and space for backups... The effects of fragmentation ripple through the database; did you know there are multiple ways to defragment? Did you know that each method provides different pros and cons in terms of maintenance, availability, log space and time? Come to this session and understand the most important strategies for index and base table structuring as well as how to keep those structures optimal.