Brian.Eriksen (11/11/2009)
Anyways, I just thought that since summary-detail table relationships are very common that it's probably worth calling out this exception to the uniqueness guideline specifically. What do you think?
Those are guidelines, not rules. If you feel that ignoring them is for the better, then go ahead. Of those guidelines, the uniqueness one is the one I most often ignore.
As I stated, I hold to the school that says the cluster is used to organise the table and the nonclustered indexes to retrieve data. I've done the summary/detail design before, often I use nonclustered indexes on the foreign key column. Other times I've used the cluster.
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It depends. 😀
If you've tested and that is the best way to organise things and the fragmentation (if the cluster is not ascending) and increased width of the cluster is not an issue, go right ahead. Just be aware of the tradeoffs
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability