I learned an interesting thing about ALTER VIEW behavior in SQL Server when applied to indexed views. This is covered in the product documentation, but it’s not something I would have expected.
The bigger your indexes are, the harder your index maintenance falls. Is it better to rebuild big indexes? Or should you reorganize?
Should you look at automatically created statistics on your tables in SQL Server to help you design better indexes? Learn why in this 20 minute video, or subscribe to the Dear SQL DBA podcast.
No time to watch? Scroll on down, everything is written in article form below the video.
Here’s this week’s question:
Should you always index your foreign keys? What if you index them, and then the index never gets used?
SQL Server’s “index usage stats” dynamic management view is incredibly useful– but does it tell you what you THINK it tells you?
I explain the quirks of how sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats works and why the information is so valuable.
Microsoft has just released a new round of cumulative updates for SQL Server 2012, and the release notes indicate that a fix to the sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats dynamic management view has been included in these updates. This is good news for index tuners using SQL Server 2012.
As of SP2 + CU12 and SP3 + CU3, SQL Server 2012 will persist index usage information even when ALTER INDEX REBUILD is run.
Recently, I was thinking about nonclustered indexes in SQL Server, and how included columns are stored.
Is SQL Server smart enough to optimize the storage for small indexes with includes? Find out in this free seven minute video.
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