Thanks for an enlightening article, Joe.

You state: "Running any form of query on a heap will force a full scan of the table and could take a considerable amount of time. And the results from the DBCC SHOWCONTIG command, which is a tool for measuring fragmentation, is also of little use on a heap. "

I want to make sure I understand correctly. If TableA has a non-clustered index on ColumnA, but no clustered indexes..... and I select * from TableA Where ColumnA = 'abc'......... a table scan will be performed?  I didn't know that. I thought by having an index on the column I'm querying on, that was sufficient to prevent a table scan (unless the table only has a few rows of course).  Please elaborate.

Thanks, John