A couple of easy wins with SQL indexes

I was lucky enough to watch a great talk by SQL expert Brent Ozar courtesy of Fog Creek. A couple of actionable takeaways that stuck with me are about creating and choosing indexes.

Indexes in SQL for me are kind of a black art. You look at Query Execution plans, try to intuit where the work is being done, and then make a guess as to what index might help. Then you see if things are “faster”. I never really know which ones are helping in an empirical way.

Turns out you can query SQL Server itself to find out. Check out this Find Missing Indexes query by Brent. And if you are wondering whether your existing indexes are doing any good, try this Find Indexes Not In Use query.

(As a practical matter, Brent recommends only changing a few indexes at a time. Keep the experiment controlled.)

These scripts look like great 80–20 solutions: a small amount of work to find the the most glaring issues. It’s the sort of thing a guru like Brent would charge big $$ for. ;)