Category Archives: Indexes

varchar(max) in an Index

There is one more attendee question from SQLSaturday #118 that I want to follow up on, and it is this: “Is there any way to create an index with a varchar(max) column as the leading column?” This question came up during my Statistics presentation, and was at the end as we were winding down.  My…

Page Allocation: Dedicated vs. Mixed Extents

When I was at a SQLSaturday a few months ago, I attended a session that hit upon SQL Server Internals, one of my favorite topics.  During the session the presenter was talking about page allocation, and mentioned that pages for a table and its indexes will reside in the same extents.  Now, I remember immediately…

SQL University – Internals and Updates

It’s Wednesday which means it’s time for the second post in the Internals series for SQL University this week.  On Monday we started off with a review of data structures for a database.  Today we are keeping with the data structures topic, but looking way under the covers at what happens when you update data. …

SQL University – Internals by the Numbers

Hello everyone, and welcome to Internals week of the 2011 Spring semester of SQL University.  I am Erin Stellato and I will be your professor this week. When you think Internals, what comes to mind?  It could be any number of topics…  The Storage Engine, the Optimizer, SQLOS, Buffer Cache – I could go on,…