Index architecture and design guide

Designing efficient indexes is key to achieving good database and application performance. A

lack of indexes, over-indexing, or poorly designed indexes are top sources of database

performance problems.

This guide describes index architecture and fundamentals, and provides best practices to help

you design effective indexes to meet the needs of your applications.

For more information about available index types, see

Indexes.

This guide covers the following types of indexes:

Clustered

Nonclustered

Unique

Filtered

Clustered columnstore

Nonclustered columnstore

Hash

Memory-optimized nonclustered

For information about XML indexes, see

XML indexes (SQL Server)

and

Selective XML indexes

(SXI).

For information about spatial indexes, see

Spatial Indexes Overview.

For information about full-text indexes, see

Populate Full-Text Indexes.

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