The Ultimate Index Usage Reporter

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The Ultimate Index Usage Reporter

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YeshuaAgapao

Posted Monday, August 04, 2008 3:34 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Ultimate Index Usage Reporter

Post #546405

David Kranes

Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 6:50 AM

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This is nice! Could you please provide a description of what the following columns mean:

user_seeks
system_seeks
user_scans
system_scans
user_lookups
system_looksups
user_updates
system_updates
score

What should I bee looking for here? What red flags should I look for?

Also, the index_columns_include never has any columns in it.

Best Regards,

~David

Post #584845

YeshuaAgapao

Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 10:19 AM

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user_* is anything initiated by the user

system_* is anything initiated by the server - statistics updates etc...

Seeks are seek operations (index seek, clustered index seek)

Scans are scan operations (index scan clustered index scan)

Lookups are only applicable to clustered indexes. They are bookmark lookups caused by when the nonclustered index not containing (seek or include) all the columns in the query (SELECT columns, JOIN predicates, WHERE predicates, ORDER BY columns). The SSMS built-in report do not report lookups.

The score in general is (seeks*10+scans+1)/(updates+1). Clustered indexes don't get penalized for updates since every table should have one, but if a nonclustered index has a higher score, you should consider changing your clustered index. Higher scores mean useful indexes, low scores mean indexes that cause more overhead than benefit. Scanning cost isn't taken into account - it is just usage vs maintenance. But a score below 0.0001 is almost for certain a useless index.

If your index_columns_include is always blank, then none 0f your indexes have include coluimns. Include columns are available for covering the query, but not for seeks - they are leaf level only. CREATE INDEX IX_table_seekcolumns_includecolumns ON dbo.table (Seek Columns) INCLUDE (Include Columns)

Post #585014

David Kranes

Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 10:26 AM

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Thank you for the explanation. That helps a lot. :)

-David

Best Regards,

~David

Post #585017

Greg Drake

Posted Friday, December 28, 2012 3:34 PM

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This is a nice script. I have a similar one I have been using and I made some improvements based on what you did. Thanks for sharing.

One thing to note: your ORDER BY clause very complex. When I ran this on a small VM it choked and literally told me the query was too hard (not enough memory, I think). I chopped off the ORDER BY and it worked fine. For me this doesn't matter because I copy the results into a spreadsheet and do my analysis there.

I don't really understand your "score" column. Is it to show the indexes that are most important?

I recently ran across the following article with scripts from Jason Strate that also deal with analyzing indexes, but he has taken it to a whole other level.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/stratesql/2012/12/18/index-analysis-the-re-return/

Post #1401084

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