• Ryan D. (8/26/2009)


    Hi,

    I have a question regarding the missing indexes section of the performance dashboard. What is the best way to approach the recommended indexes?

    Slowly, maintain eye contact, and carry a really big stick...

    Oh, you mean how do decide which one's to implement.

    I wouldn't recommend that you use that data by itself. I'd combine it with a collection of long running queries and most frequently called queries. You'll need to collect that with a server side trace. Then, unfortunately, there's no easy way to marry the missing index data to specific queries... Unless you do something like I blogged about here. There are some other people that have also posted scripts that do the same thing (several of them better than mine) so you can do a search to track them down.

    Once you decide that a query and a missing index match up and you're ready to use the index, test it. The missing index information is based on estimates within the optimizer, and it can be wrong.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning