I was tempted to go down the "...unless..." path because I can envisage the rest of the create statement introducing an UNIQUE constraint on the foreign key column - that produces an index to support the UNIQUE constraint, and as the foreign key column is the only column in the unique key it can be used as an index on that column. However, I didn't go there because an index on the referencing column does nothing to support the Foreign Key constraint - support for a Foreign Key constraint is provided by an index (created with a Primary Key or Unique constraint) on the referenced key in the referenced table, and indexes in the referencing table don't provide any such support. Actually they do - they support updates and deletes of referenced keys quite nicely if you have such horrors - but SQL Server won't generate an index with teh purpose of providing such support because such an index more often degrades performance than improves it; the question did appear to me to be very clearly about creating an index with the puropose of supporting the foreign key constraint.