Fundamentals of Index Tuning (Instant Replay)
You’re comfortable writing T-SQL queries, and now you want to make ’em faster – without changing the queries themselves.
In this one-day course, you’ll learn:
- How to design indexes for a query without looking at its execution plan
- How to pick the order of keys in an index
- How query parameter values can change which index is better
- Where to find index recommendations using query plans, DMVs, and sp_BlitzIndex
- How SQL Server’s index recommendations are built, and why they’re often wrong
Note: this course does not cover columnstore, In-Memory OLTP, XML, or spatial indexes. (Nothing against those – they’re just beyond fundamentals.)
Your Progress So Far in This Class
This is driven by the mark-as-complete buttons in each module of the class. (Let’s be honest: you’re probably just going to mark them as complete because you’re that kind of student. I feel you.)
Introductions
I introduce myself, the other attendees, and our goals for the class.
- 0 Prerequisites Before the Class
- 1 Designing Indexes for the WHERE Clause
- 2 Lab: Indexing for WHERE
- 3 Designing Indexes for ORDER BY
- 4 Lab: Indexing for WHERE + ORDER BY
- 5 Designing Indexes for JOINs
- 6 Lab – Indexing for Joins
- 7 SQL Server’s Built-In Index Recommendations
- 8 Recap and Next Steps
- Bonus Lab – Getting Index Recommendations and Tuning Them