Inside Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005, Fourth Edition

The Structure of Index Pages

Note

Basic index organization is discussed in Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying, but because it is crucial that you understand the basic structure before reading the rest of this chapter, some overlap between the two volumes is necessary. However, the T-SQL querying volume looks at indexes from the perspective of using them to retrieve results from a query, and this chapter looks in depth at their internal structure.

Index pages are structured much like data pages. As with all other types of pages in SQL Server, index pages have a fixed size of 8 kilobytes (KB), or 8,192 bytes. Index pages also have a 96-byte ...