Index Creation Guidelines for SQL Server can be pretty sparse. Usually there are a couple, clustered index for ranges, nonclustered, etc. Leo Peysakhovich has taken some time to write down his guidelines based on his experience for creating indexes and the rational for doing so. He's also taken a few minutes to look at which indexes NOT to create, something that might be worth knowing..   Read more...

A short piece on indexing using multiple columns. For those of you that have 10 single column indexes, read a little about why you might choose to index on multiple columns.  Read more...

Index Creation Guidelines for SQL Server can be pretty sparse. Usually there are a couple, clustered index for ranges, nonclustered, etc. Leo Peysakhovich has taken some time to write down his guidelines based on his experience for creating indexes and the rational for doing so. He's also taken a few minutes to look at which indexes NOT to create, something that might be worth knowing..   Read more...

A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   Read more...

This white paper discusses the basics of indexes, such as density and selectivity, effects of many versus few indexes, long versus short keys, covering indexes, and how the SQL Server optimizer chooses indexes  Read more...

This book from Microsoft Press has a lot of good information that will help you do capacity planning and performance tuning. Is it worth buying though? Andy just finishing reading it and writing the review, see what he thinks!   Read more...

The Index Wizard is a handy tool shipped as part of the SQL 7 Profiler that can analyze a set of SQL queries and suggest index changes that could improve their performance.   Read more...