Matt Crowley (1/21/2014)
At a leaf level, a clustered index is the table. If you have a primary key defined on a column defined as nvarchar(32), and your table has a LOB column in it, you will probably see LOB storage at the leaf level of the output of sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (I don't have an example handy, so some testing will need to be done to confirm).
Ah, ok, that makes sense (duh). You are correct, this particular table does have an ntext column, so that would make sense why I have a LOB_DATA then. So again in this particular case (I have well over 50,000 more incidents globally), it would make sense to only focus on IN_ROW_DATA.
I'm simply trying to understand what if any ramifications exist by limiting myself to IN_ROW_DATA only across the board. Keeping in mind, I have to manage over 5,000 databases ... so I try to handle all scenario's properly. I just worry that by changing my ~7 year old logic that I am going to begin missing indexes out there.