Right, I know it’s Friday and everyone’s tired and looking forward to the weekend, but I do need to finish off this indexing section and I’ll try to keep this short and interesting and hopefully keep everyone awake.

There’s no shortage of information available on how to create indexes. Hell, I’ve written a copious amount myself. Most of these many articles however are written from the point of indexing single queries. What you chose for a where clause, what has to go into the include to create the perfect index for this query. Now that’s all well and good, but I’ve never met a system that had only one query per table (maybe there is such a system out there, but I’ve never found it)

So what I’m going to try to do today is address the topic of a strategy for indexing. How to approach indexing, not for a single query, but for the system as a whole. I won’t be able to cover this in-depth, this is material worthy of an entire book chapter, if not an entire book, but I can at least touch on the essential portions.

Now, there’s two main positions that we could be in when considering indexing strategies for an entire system
1) A brand new system that’s still in development
2) An existing system that’s being used actively.

One at a time…

Indexing strategies for a brand new system

Start by choosing a good clustered index. What makes a good clustered index? Well, it depends 🙂

• http://www.scarydba.com/2011/04/04/sql-universityrecommendations-for-a-clustered-index/
• http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/GUIDs-as-PRIMARY-KEYs-andor-the-clustering-key.aspx
• http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/The-Clustered-Index-Debate-Continues.aspx
• http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/Ever-increasing-clustering-key-the-Clustered-Index-Debateagain!.aspx
• http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/The-Clustered-Index-Debate-again!.aspx
• http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/68563/
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/gg508879.aspx (video)

The clustered index is the base, it will affect each and every nonclustered index, and it’s not trivial to change once the system is in use, so chose carefully. I’m not saying another word on the subject of a clustered index, not today.

Once that’s done…

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Welcome back to day 2 of Advanced Indexing. Today we’re going to look at a feature that was added in SQL Server 2008 – filtered indexes.

In versions previous, indexes were always on the entire table. An index would always have the same number of rows as the table it was built on did (which is why COUNT(*) can just scan the smallest index on the table)

With filtered indexes, it’s possible to have an index that’s built on a subset of the rows in the table. The definition for a filtered index contains a WHERE clause predicate that determines if a row in the table will be in the index or not.

This can be a major advantage on really large tables where most queries are only interested in a small fraction of the table. A normal index would be based on the entire table regardless of the fact that most of the table is of no interest, meaning the index would be larger than necessary, deeper than necessary and take up more space than would be ideal. With a filtered index on just the interesting portion of the table, the index size is kept to a minimum, meaning it’s shallower than an index on the entire table and hence more efficient.

A simple example of a filtered index would be

CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX idx_Example
ON Account (AccountNumber)
WHERE Active = 1;

There are two main uses of a filtered index:
1) Enforcing moderately complex uniqueness requirements
2) Supporting queries that filter on common subsets of a table

Filtered indexes and unique columns

One very interesting use of filtered indexes is in enforcing uniqueness over portions of a table. One requirement that come up again and again is to have a nullable column that must have unique entries in it, but whose entries are optional. Basically, the column must be unique or null. Sounds easy, but the problem is that a unique index allows only one null. So much for nulls not being equal to anything including other nulls.

Prior to SQL 2008 implementing such a constraint required computed columns, indexed views or triggers. With SQL 2008’s filtered indexes, it’s trivial.

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Good day everyone and welcome to another week of SQL University. I know we’re getting close to the end of the year and everyone’s looking forward to a nice long vacation soaking up the sun at the beach, but a little bit of attention would be nice. Thank you.

This week is Advanced Indexing, and I mean advanced, none of that selectivity, SARGable, predicate stuff that gets repeated all over the place. If you need a refresher on the basics before we get started, the following can be considered pre-requisite reading for this course

• Introduction to Indexes, Part the First
• Introduction to Indexes, Part the Second
• Introduction to Indexes, Part the Third
• Recommendations for a Clustered Index
• Index Usage

There’s also some additional background material available for more enthusiastic students:

• Introduction to Indexes
• Introduction to Indexes: Part 2 – The clustered index
• Introduction to Indexes: Part 3 – The nonclustered index
• Index Internals (Video)
• The Clustered Index Debate (Video)
• Index Selectivity and Column Order

Right, now that the admin has been handled, let’s get straight into things. Nothing like starting at the deep end…

Most people would rightly associate indexes with where clause predicates and joins, after all, the main usage of an index is to reduce the rows in consideration for a query as fast as possible. However there’s another portion of your queries that indexes can, if appropriately designed, help with – grouping and sorting.

Sorting is an extremely expensive operation, especially on large numbers of rows. For the academics in the audience, the algorithmic complexity of sorting is above linear, the time to sort a set of data increases faster than the number of items in the list. The common sorting algorithms have an average time complexity of O(n log n). It’s better than O(n²), but it can still hurt at the higher row counts.

O(n²) on the left, O(n log n) on the right (Thanks to QuickMath)

Right, the non-academics can wake up now.

The other reason that sorting hurts is that it needs a memory grant to do the sort. If there’s a shortage of memory the query could have to wait a while for the memory to be granted and, if the optimiser mis-estimates the number of rows to be sorted, the memory grant could be insufficient and the sort would have to spill into TempDB. You don’t want that happening.

Finally, sort is a blocking operator in the execution plan (all rows must have been fetched from the source before any output can be returned), and so the client won’t start seeing rows returned until the entire sort has been completed. This can make the query feel like it takes longer than it really does.

Grouping and aggregation are much the same. To aggregate one set of values based on another set of values, SQL has to get all the like values of the grouping columns together so that it can do the aggregation. That sounds suspiciously like a sort doesn’t it?

SQL doesn’t always sort to do aggregations, but the alternative – hash tables – isn’t exactly free (homework exercise – read up on hash tables)

So for both sorting and grouping, the query processor’s job would be a lot easier if there was some way that it could get the data ordered by the sorting or grouping columns without having to do the work of actually sorting. Sounds impossible? No.

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