Expert Performance Indexing in SQL Server 2019: Toward Faster Results and Lower Maintenance

by Jason Strate

Take a deep dive into perhaps the single most important facet of good indexes, and how to best use them. Recent updates to SQL Server have made it possible to create indexes in situations that in the past would have prevented their use.Other improvements covered in this book include new dynamic management views, the ability to pause and resume index maintenance, and the ability to more easily recover from failures during index creation and maintenance operations. This new edition also brings new content around the indexing of columnstore and in-memory tables, showing how these new types of tables and the queries that execute against them can also benefit from good indexing practices. The book begins with explanations of the types of indexes and how they are stored in databases. Moving deeper into the topic, and further into the book, you will look at the statistics that are accumulated both by indexes and on indexes. You will better understand what indexes are doing in the database and what can be done to mitigate and improve their effect on performance. You will get a look at the Index Advisor now available in Azure SQL Database, and learn how to review and maintain the health of your indexes. The final chapters present a guided tour through a number of scenarios showing approaches you can take to investigate, mitigate, and improve the performance of your database.What You Will LearnProperly index row store, columnstore, and in-memory tablesReview statistics to understand indexing choices made by the optimizerApply indexing strategies such as covering indexes, included columns, and index intersectionsRecognize and remove unnecessary indexesDesign effective indexes for full-text, spatial, and XML data typesManage the big Encompass all indexes in a database, and all database instances on a serverWho This Book Is ForDatabase administrators and developers who are ready to lift the performance of their database environment by thoughtfully building indexes to speed up queries that matter the most and make a difference to the business

801 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 28, 2019

Reviews

[Ivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is good at explaining many concepts and arguing the reasons behind them.
The main issue, however, is in the fact that the books is SO poorly edited.
So many formatting issues, such as inconsistent fonts in a sentence where a column name was highlighted in Consolas and then the rest of the phrase continues in the same font.
Some grammatical errors spotted.
Some tables list column names with errors.
The biggest issue however is the fact that some images show query results and are discussed in text, but the image doesn't agree with the text - the description and the table shown in the picture are different.
Formatting errors aren't that big of an issue in the grand scheme of things, but it takes away a lot for me from the overall experience of the book.
It just doesn't deem to be a book that is in it's third edition. Such poor attention to detail can't be explained in a professional book. I am actually surprised that the printing company allowed this book to go out in it's state.
I regret buying this book, but it has useful information, so if you can get it cheaply on some sale - it might be worth considering it.

[Luke Darling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the layout and material in this book. The only negative I have is that some of the queries did not work by default and I had to work with the queries a little bit. In general though, it was helping me with a task that I was trying to do to improve performance in the Cloud.

Recommend if you want to understand how and why indexing in a sql database works.