Inside Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005, Fourth Edition

Chapter 7. Index Internals and Management

In this chapter:

Index Organization

Creating an Index

The Structure of Index Pages

Index Space Requirements

Special Indexes

Table and Index Partitioning

Data Modification Internals

Managing Indexes

Using Indexes

Summary

Indexes are the other significant user-defined, on-disk data structure besides tables. An index provides fast access to data when the data can be searched by the value that is the index key. I included some very basic information about indexes in Chapter 2, but to really understand the benefit that indexes can provide and how to determine the best indexes for your environment, we need to take a deeper look into the organization of Microsoft SQL Server indexes.

In this chapter, I’ll show you the physical ...